Tim's Home Page » Thoughts

Question

tim — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:46:19 +0000

“What shoes do fish wear?” There must be loads of answers to this.

The best one I came up with: ‘igh ‘eels.

Mexican Jumping Beans

tim — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:58:43 +0000

When I was at school there was a newsagent around the corner that sold real Mexican Jumping Beans, in little tubes containing about five each. Not the little plastic lozenge-shape toys with ball-bearings giving them momentum, but the real things (see Wikipedia article). I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when one of them would jump. It seems like they only had them around in the shop for about two weeks, and then they were gone. Years ago I went back to that shop to ask them about it, but the person there didn’t know anything about them.

If you put one onto your hand, the warmth from your hand would make the moth larva that lives inside twitch to try to move the bean somewhere cooler.

Anyway, we’d been talking about toys we remember from when we were young, and those beans were pretty high up my list.

Perfect Storm for Phishing

tim — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:54:06 +0000

The Government’s cavalier handling of our personal data is now well publicised. What mystifies me is what’s keeping the phishing scammers from taking advantage of it. I haven’t yet seen any emails purporting to be from the Government trying to get people to register to protect their details.

It’s just a matter of time before some scammer realises that they don’t need the HMRC discs, just enough people who are so worried about the HMRC scandal that they don’t think straight when reading about a way to protect their personal information.

Milk bottle tops

tim — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:38:35 +0000

Looks like the birds in this area are wise to the old “peck the milk bottle tops” trick. But do birds like milk? I’m not sure I really see what’s in it for them except to annoy people.

Of course, I’m assuming it was done by a bird and that the milkman didn’t put his thumb through the top by accident — but if you look closely, it looks like there is a small hole that’s been pecked (see exhibit A, left).

Anyone know what sort of bird does this, and why? Perhaps magpies, trying to collect silvery things?

Pre-order now! (13 years early)

tim — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:24:41 +0000

Not long to wait now for the DVD box set of The Wonder Years. You can pre-order it now at Amazon… but can that release date really be right?

My dæmon

tim — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:53:56 +0000

“The Golden Compass” is the name of the film of Northern Lights, the first of the trilogy His Dark Materials. I’ve been persuaded to take the “meet your dæmon” test from the web site. Creepy result below…

Other people’s rubbish

tim — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:50:11 +0000

Communal bins can be a pain. Round here, there are bins for recycling and bins for “normal” (non-recyclable) rubbish, and the bin collectors are particularly picky — if they spot anything that has been sorted incorrectly they will just leave it the whole bin. One of the households sharing the bins mistook the “normal” rubbish bin for the recycling bin (they’re new), and started putting bottles, cans, bits of paper etc in it, leaving me with no room for my bag of “normal” rubbish.

So I’ve just finished emptying it out into the correct bin to make sure the bin men take it (sigh). But now, I know exactly whose rubbish it is (from addresses and names), and if I’d wanted to I could have read through their bank statements.

Buy a shredder! And put your rubbish in the right bin! (Yes, you. You know who you are.)

And now: dramatic whitespace

tim — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:33:34 +0000

(with apologies to Adam Bildersee)

Great World Wide Star Count

tim — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:13:58 +0000

I’ve done my star counting. Now I know where the Summer Triangle is, as well as the Northern Cross. The point of the star count is to try to build a map of light pollution; but really, there’s no need for an excuse to look up at the stars for quarter of an hour in the evening.

Royal Mail strike

tim — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:07:13 +0000

Today the Royal Mail have asked us all not to use post boxes so as to avoid backlogs when the strikes are over. There will be no deliveries until next Thursday. My question: since it was privatised, and mail delivery has been opened up for competition, why does this affect me? Why can’t I just post a letter in a post box belonging to some Royal Mail rival?

UPDATE: Royal Mail was not privatised, but postal delivery was opened up to competition except for the last mile.

In the mean time, if you live near a nice old Post Office building and like using it: hurry up! Near me there’s one in Post Office Road — POST OFFICE ROAD! — that’s going to be closed when they move it into WHSmith. Has it really come to this?