The Lair of the SlowFox

So, yesterday's match saw Hull City take on Stoke, and at half-team the Tigers (for such are called Hull City) were 0-1 down, due to some awful defending on our part. We'd started brightly, and Jimmy Bullard (our star player who lasted all of 37 minutes last season before succumbing to a knee injury) was clearly exerting a positive influence on the side.

Nonetheless, at half-time I was texting to brundle that although I could see us scraping an equaliser, if Stoke got a second then that'd be it, game over.

Stoke have terrifically vocal away support, and they were on top form yesterday, what with some stirring renditions of 'You're getting sacked in the morning' and such like in the first half (Phil Brown, Hull's not universally-loved manager, has something of a metaphorical guillotine hanging over his head, given a really rather appalling run that covers most of the current calendar year).

However, in the second half, Hull equalised courtesy of Olofinjana, a former Stoke player himself, at which point the Hull faithfull broke into a rousing chorus of 'You're not singing any more' at the Stoke fans. And with the crowd well and truly up, the pendulum swung in the home side's favour.

At 1-1, with five minutes to go, and Hull clearly on top, I said to P that the match was going to end with us disappointed with 'only' a point, whereas at half-time I'd been thinking that if we'd been lucky, that was the most that we could have expected.

And then (deep breath) Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink scored in injury time, the crowd went wild and Hull secured a vital three points and moved out of the relegation zone.

The first half, despite some glimpses of promise, hadn't been that great, but the second half? That was epic :D

Kinda screwed up at work, through, um, misprioritising some work, and through a further misunderstanding between me and boss, the fallout sort of escalated way high before coming back down.

Not irrecoverable, but decidedly unfortunate - it galls me to be remembered for the things I get wrong.

Have the day off work today, as I'm on childcare duties, looking after P and W, one of his friends from school. This afternoon we're off to the cinema, this morning we've taken the dog for a walk (principally to acclimatise him to the New Person's presence, which seemed to work, mostly), and have tried to generate some enthusiasm within W for the Avenues Tree Sculptures (we have a new one in memory of Anthony Minghella, who used to live on Park), but I'm not sure I succeeded on that count.

Cartogrammar has come up with this neat mash-up, colouring maps (of Harvard) based upon the predominant colour of photographs taken at a given point. Pretty darned cool.

XKCD is awesome, and if you aren't subscribed to xkcd_feed, you really should be. That said, someone please tell me what Primer is, film-wise, because going by the line-format plot summary, it looks mind-blowing!

I mentioned to P a while back about The Wine Gum Experiment on YouTube, which features the awesome Charlie documenting the suspiciously non-uniform colour distribution in packs of sweets. P clearly felt that this subject needed further research over the weekend, and saved up enough money to buy 10 packs of Wine Gums so as to have a sufficient data set. I'll need to grab the photographic documentation from him next time he's at Castle Fox, but the executive summary is that Charlie was definitely onto something with his original video. Actually, P wasn't alone in sharing Charlie's concern: there's a veritable plethora of documentary evidence on YouTube, which P & I may feel compelled to add to at some point :D

ms_katonic will probably just nod sagely when I mention that a Japanese trawler was sunk by a giant jellyfish the other day.

The XBox is currently residing up at The Farm, so I found LifeHacker's article on how to build a standalone xbmc media centre rather timely. Y'see, the main use the XBox was put to was as a media centre, and I actually have the article's Acer Aspire Revo 3600 (with extra RAM), and so decided to wipe Karmic from it in favour of XBMC, with the NVidia drivers slipstreamed in. (Don't worry, the netbook's running Karmic, and it seems pretty good so far). XBMC? It seems excellent - my only problem is that 160Gb isn't enough storage space - I'll probably swap out the current drive for something a little bigger in due course, but to be going on with, it fits the bill perfectly.

ETA: I'm not sure if I should thank aome, but she's certainly the one who pointed me to Twiglight Barbies...

I'm realising that whilst my recollections of instalments I and II of Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn were pretty good, I'm waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off-base with Book III. There's so much that I have absolutely no recollection of I'm beginning to wonder if I actually did read the thing the first time around.

Well, no, I'm not, because I distinctly remember my total Ione/Tranquility!love for their escape, and I remember the machinations of B7 back on Earth and that stuff. But the bit where Joshua's negotiating with the zero-g seahorses had completely slipped my mind.

Still enjoying it, but these are thick books, so a proper review will have to wait a little while longer.

In other book news, I caved, and the hardback Sookie, Dead and Gone arrived in today's post. Guess I'm reading that next :D

It didn't help that our network connection got chopped mid-afternoon, but today's been a bit of a mad scramble.

I'm supposed to be on leave tomorrow, but it's looking like I'm going to have to pop in at least briefly in the morning to fix some import issues that I haven't been able to resolve today.

( Flash Forward 4 )

Back at Castle Fox, briefly, before heading out to the KC Stadium to watch Hull take on the might Portsmouth in a six-pointer this afternoon.

Back from, this morning, a UN conference on Climate Change being held at the Guildhall. John Prescott, croquet-playing former Deputy Prime Minister, was due to be speaking at 12, but we got a call at about that time from his car (one of the notorious two Jags, no doubt) to say that he was mired in traffic on the motorway (so, evidently, some fair way off), and necessitates meant that I had to leave before our most honoured guest arrived.

Dianne Johnson, my current constituency MP was there to show her face... quite literally, as far as I could tell, in that she arrived, sat down and read a couple of papers before, but by the time I next looked across, she'd vanished. Ah, but She Was There, and that's the important thing to note, of course.

As for the conference itself, well, there were maybe 40 personages drawn from this fine city present. Most were, I feel, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too optimistic about human nature, and weren't willing to follow through the implications of what they were suggestion in terms of its impacts upon day to day life for us all.

I make no bones about this; with world population projected to hit 9bn people by mid-century, conventional oil production most likely having peaked in 2005, and the impact of increasing water stress across different areas of the globe, lifestyles are going to have to change drastically. Climate Change ups the challenge of feeding those 9bn people without the aid of petrochemical fertilisers and weedkillers, without the oil-driven mechanisation of industrial farming, struggling with the diminishing resources of fossil aquifers...

It's singularly ironic, methinks, that the 'greens' are constantly pilloried for wanting to sacrifice 'lifestyle' for the sake of the planet. From my perspective, that assessment is fundamentally flawed: the 'greens' are, for want of a better description, attempting to wrest what elements of a sustainable lifestyle can be wrung from the mess that's coming - it's naked self-interest for humanity's sake. Don't worry about Earth - we can pretty much do what we want, and it'll endure regardless.

But this fragile project of civilisation that we've got going here? That's something else.

On the bright side, True Blood S1 arrived in today's post :-P