Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in pungoose's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
10:12 pm	ha! ... and wound up in The Worst French Restaurant In Soho for dinner (it had a pianist who knew the first three bars of at least two songs, the ugliest paintings you've ever seen on the wall, and a waitress who spoke no known language. The food took over two hours to come, and was neither what we had ordered, nor warm, nor edible). (from an afterword written by Neil Gaiman). Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
10:40 pm	OH! MY! GOD! A DUCK! IN THE OFFICE! Current Mood: delighted (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
10:42 pm	The small bird emerged from the water. It looked dreadful. It was covered in mud and green weed. "Aaah! What sort of Black Swan are you?" "I'm not a Black Swan at all, you stupid man!" "What are you if you're not a swan? You certainly look like ..." "I certainly don't feel like a swan!" (with apologies to Mr Scruff) Nicholas Naseem Taleb says: "The Black Swan is about these unexpected events that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything. Before they happen we consider them close to impossible; Outside the arts, my favorite one is the emergence of the computer and the internet..." The internet? Over what timescale? Computing history began terribly slowly (Babbage, Lovelace), through the analogue computers & calculating & codebreaking machines of the Second World War. The internet, as experienced by the layman today, does, indeed, seem miraculous, but people keep finding oddities prefiguring it, including Vannevar Bush's Memex, and several early 1990s short films, documentaries, and sales pitches, including Hyperland and Starfire. Oh, and it gets better. Here's Arthur C. Clarke, in The Fountains of Paradise, writing in 1979: ... Morgan was left face to face with the accumulated art and knowledge of all mankind. In his student days, he had won several retrieval championships, racing against the clock while digging out obscure items of information on lists prepared by ingeniously sadistic judges. ("What was the rainfall in the capital of the world's smallest national state on the day when the second largest number of home runs was scored in college basketball?" was one that he recalled with particular affection). His skill had improved with years... The display came up in thirty seconds, in far more detail than he really needed. But, then, tFoP is set somewhere in the 22nd century, and Clarke has been known to write things like "We really must find something better than the internal combustion engine", in the late 1960s, I think. Still waiting for that one, and no, nuclear powered cars don't count. (Or flying cars. Especially flying nuclear powered cars, eesh... though, if memory serves, Clarke never learned to drive, regarding a means of transport that prevented the traveller from reading as a stupid idea). I think Taleb refers, somewhere, to grey swans (which are somewhat unpredictable). I want to call technological developments which are, in principle, foreseeable, but which lurk in the background for ages before springing forth, as greylag geese. They're grey, because they hide; lag, because of the unpredictable delay, and geese, because they're not really as exotic or surprising as swans. However, when they've been talked about for 30-40 years, it is moderately startling when a huge flock of them suddenly appear, honking loudly, and towing a stock market bubble behind them. (That, there, is the late 1990s). Also, Anser answer are rather charming, and deserve to have something named after them, I feel. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
8:42 am	Naming your cows is beneficial. The study says nothing about the benefits of naming geese, however. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
2:07 pm	Retailing: You're doing it wrong So, I want to buy this book, right? First call is amazon - maybe they can get it to me early next week. Some sort of expedited shipping option (not really that sort of shipping; no, not this sort, either) option. "That'll cost a tenner", say amazon, though possibly because there were other things in the basket, "but would you like a one month subscription to some sort of free rapid shipping thing?" "Fleeb", I think, indecisively, at which point I realise I could go to a real bookshop. Ah, but maybe I could reserve online, because I know the book I'm after, and who knows if they'll have it or not? (I've heard that they keep smaller stocks now, because of internet shopping). First stop: Foyles. Erkgh, their website really could use some work. Waterstones's is much slicker, but both of them take the same attitude, which appears to be, no! You cannot pay us money! We are going to make this difficult! We are going to make you sign up, give a password, give postal addresses, even though you're not about to get anything posted to you! We want to be amazon! And, a credit card transaction? Do they want to encourage me to buy nothing else in the shop by having made certain I'd paid already? Boggle. Waterstones's looks slicker, but doesn't look like they particularly streamline the reserve-and-collect-in-person process either. As I recall, argos do, but they're a special case because they already have an unorthodox no-showroom shop design, and anyway, they don't sell books. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
1:38 pm	Vaguely considering setting up a blog for sensible, more on-the-record comment. Unsurprisingly, this blog tends to end up full of silly things like wordplay and waterbirds. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
9:35 am	Boris the spider London Mayor. And victory speeches in surprisingly good grace. I await the promised New Routemasters curiously. Current Music: The Who, "Boris the Spider" (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
12:52 pm	I'm sorry, I haven't a Humph Took me until now to realise. Current Mood: sad (Comment on this)
Monday, April 7th, 2008
9:35 pm	(retrospective) chicken basque A mass catering outlet I shall not name claimed to serve something called a "basque chicken", which was, well, rubbish. They had some of the right ingredients, but in the wrong order, and I was disappointed enough to wikipoogle basque chicken and see what came out, and this did, so I finally got round to trying it today, and it came out, I have to say, rather well. I interpreted it fairly liberally lazily, like using chicken drumsticks rather than a whole chicken, and concentrated stock rather than boiling the giblets. Oh, and not adding more salt. Still came out fairly well. Recommended. Probably works well for serving few people (only one pot), and also for big gatherings, if you have a pot big enough (a lot of the vegetables are fairly coarsely chopped). (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
9:48 pm	squeeee!!!! Edit for unconfusion: Aza Raskin talks about Enso, his launcher software for getting computers to do what you want easily and more quickly. The squeenshot above is that software running on a mac; the existing version only runs under Windows. Of course, wanting computers to do what you want easily, without lots of "Are you sure? (Yes)" is presumably a stupid mac thing. :P (Does this count as an adult concept? I think it probably doesn't). (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
9:56 am	Why/How Jeanette Winterson drives me up the wall (or, "Geese are not the only Waterbirds") JW was interviewed in today's New Scientist, and said (italics are her, normal text is me) I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Grace or Margaret Atwood, are great... That is, frankly, a bit rich coming from someone who has just written a book called The Stone Gods, about, er, leaving Earth and settling a new planet, and who is writing a book called Robot Love, featuring a robot. Admittedly, for all I know, JW gave a lengthy and personal description of how genre sci-fi is intolerable after she had a dreadfully embarrassing teenage crush on a Betazoid... but the NS editor went "sod it" and removed the explanation. Anyway... When Stephen Hawking bangs on about how the future of mankind is in space, it makes me really depressed. It's a boy's fantasy, like not tidying your bedroom because your mother will do it - trash the place, then leave it. I wanted to challenge the idea that we can simply leave. Even if we could leave, not many of us would be allowed to go. It would be terrible. Congratulations! You've just found the plot for The Songs of Distant Earth, which you probably never read, because it's science fiction. Anyway, that was a tiny-minded homespun gendered analogy. Here's more: But there is a sense in which boys get mesmerised with the potential of invention in a mad, Dr Frankenstein way... Women are realistic probably because right across the world they're still the ones who tend the children, or look after the land. It's not wonder that we call the planet "she". It is home: men are always trying to escape from home, but we, women, are "home". Sheesh. If I tried saying things like that amongst feminists, I'd be swiftly bashed over the head, stuffed with sage and onion, and roast before you could say "Honk". Look, you couldn't be any more sweeping if you were pushing an extremely large broom. It gets stranger: I tent to put my faith in the power of thought because I think people need to change from the inside out, not the outside in ... *sings* I see a little silhoutetto of a false dichotomy - that never works. Never? Rarely? Sometimes? Never on a Thursday? I can has citation or argument with sweeping statement pls. We've got into a "science can fix it" mentality... No matter how much we pollute the planet, science will clean it up, if we run out of oil it doesn't matter because the boffins will think of some other way. Granted, there are those who argue that, and there have been for ages. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes. But I really think that school of thought has declined markedly since (say) the 1970s. Certainly there's currently a chorus of "reduce carbon emissions, switch shit off". I don't hear very many people saying "Noo, there's no problem, science will fix it!". There are certainly some saying "Climate change? Pah! s'all made up" -- including my very own Old Grandmother Goose -- but, hey, let's keep with the stereotypes here, females make homes and crochet cushions, males break stuff. Right? Right. (It's just proper gander). It's always pushing the responsibility... onto "other" people... giving them enormous power and, at the same time, suggesting that there really aren't any problems. It's this "delegation" thing. Y'know, we do things to help others? The monkey represents sharing. It doesn't mean the problem "just vanishes". (Then there's the assumption that "science" is done by boffins, who are, naturally, someone else). It's the George W. Bush school of thought, which cannot be right. Sod it. Gave up arguing, and used a typographical solution instead. ... the speed of love, which proves to be the one thing faster than light Um. Squick. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more science fiction written as well as Winterson writes, and I'm more than happy to see sciencefictional themes hopping into mainstream literature and discussion, but too much of this feels like it spins down an entropic funnel, lined with Teflon, greased with non-sequiturs and sweeping, dubious assertions, and everything ends up being about love, domesticity, and untidy bedrooms. You can probably do that to a whole library, but if you're going to smash knowledge to pieces and pour it into a very small heap, a compression algorithm would be less destructive, and a big fire would be funner. With marshmallows. Yum. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
8:25 am	WILL SELF says Harry potter books are badly written! Current Mood: amused Current Music: alanis morissette, "ironic" (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
9:14 am	Analogy of the day: "It's like trying to herd snails safely away from a forest fire" Current Mood: inconsolable (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 9th, 2007
11:58 pm	Odd Apple Software Update bug I thought I'd put this here, because I earlier googled & drew a blank. Well now, I was trying to run Software Update (on OSX 10.4.9), and it was telling me it wouldn't work because I wasn't connected to the Internet. Well, that was rubbish, and it did it for about a week, so clearly the internet was fine, and so were Apple's servers... So I had a look in the logs (console.log), and found 2007-06-08 00:15:47.883 System Preferences[21676] loader:didFailWithError:NSError "XML parser error: Encountered unexpected EOF Old-style plist parser error: Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex " Domain=SUCatalogLoader Code=0 UserInfo={ NSLocalizedDescription = " NSURL = http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog; } Cue a great deal of mucking about, including trying to search the entire system for knackered plists, and ktracing the command line softwareupdate. There appears to have been some corrupt data in /Users/[my username]/Library/Caches/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate. Clearing that removed the problem. Current Mood: aggravated (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
10:53 pm	Collaborations Joels Veitch and Spolsky should collaborate. This would yield strange and mildly disturbing animations and songs about the merits of source control, daily builds, and a quiet working environment. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
11:21 pm	SWAN!!! Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
8:36 am	Threeplay from Sky, or, "holy f**k, it's 2007" Profuse & humble apologies to Don McLean. Note to the Judge: If you sentence me for crimes against music, please exile me to Siberia. Ta. Warning: contains anachronisms, nostalgia, and dubious rhyme & meter. A long, long time ago... I can still remember How that internet used to make me smile. And I knew if I could start ed The world might notice what I said And, maybe, I’d be happy for a while. But the Long September made me shiver With every spam and phish delivered. Bad news in the inbox; I couldn’t start one more SOCKS... I can’t remember if I knew When I read about Wired's "Long Boom" But something touched me deep inside The day the Mosaic died. So... (Chorus) Buy, buy, a threeplay package from Sky, IE7 said "ActiveX", but it wouldn't say why. And the comp. sci. undergrads all get exceptions with try(), singin', "a stack trace, and my program has died" "A stack trace, and my program has died!" Did you read the RFCs, And do you have faith in the W3C, if the standards say you SHOULD? Did you believe in Xanadu, or did you just say "Theodor ... Holm Who?" and can you tell me why my connection's ... real slow? (More may follow) Current Music: Don McLean (Comment on this)
Friday, December 8th, 2006
6:33 pm	Christmas is coming and I am getting fat. Current Mood: alarmed (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 25th, 2006
11:55 am	"steady-state economy" I am deeply alarmed by green campaigners' tendency to lurch from seemingly making sense to talking (what seems to me to be) absolute drivel. Example: In New Scientist (25th November '06), Thomas Homer-Dixon is interviewed, and says: it's increasingly clear that [an endlessly growing economy] is incompatible with the long-term viability of Earth's environment. We need to know what a "steady state" economy - one with a roughly constant output of goods and services - might look like. You can imagine economic output, and how it's produced, staying at the current level, instead of growing. This would make lots of people poorer, but it wouldn't reduce CO2 emissions, protect fisheries, or anything else. Conversely, you may be able to imagine a massive shift towards more sustainable means of production (the usual suspects: integrated pest control, renewable energy, emissions trading schemes, polluter-pays, recycling...) which would reduce ecological footprint without a massive (?) cost in foregone GDP. steadystate.org claim this: In a steady state economy, society focuses on goals more noble than economic growth. ... like, preventing economic growth? Is that a worthwhile goal? (That's not to say that growth in GDP is necessarily the best thing for human welfare... there's a lot which GDP doesn't count. But it's far easier to campaign for that sort of thing when you haven't set yourself up on a soapbox fetishising constant GDP, rather than increasing GDP). My current opinion: Trying to reduce ecological footprint by flattening GDP is akin to trying to reduce the spread of HIV by reducing the number of orgasms experienced. Current Mood: puzzled (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
8:41 pm	I was bored with the Internet, so travelled around a bit. I didn't try and actually walk around the world, or even very far. Anyway, I'm back, and London seems very big and busy. (2 Comments |Comment on this)