The Lair of the SlowFox

Stream of dreams

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:54:44 GMT

It's always the same when I wake up after 4am, but before 5.45am - I wonder whether it's worth trying to get back to sleep, or whether I should just get up anyway. This morning I decided I'd try and get back to sleep, and amazingly I actually managed to achieve it this time.

What was weird was that I then had a whole sequence of dreams, one after the other, all distinct, but sadly the details now are too faded to recall. One, at least, had my dad, post-op but recovering, in, which is certainly unusual (I hardly ever have dreams involving M/D/Brother), but is probably explained by the fact that I rang him yesterday evening to check how things are. He certainly sounds a lot better, so that's good.

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Just a few minutes more....

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:27:31 GMT

Overslept by 40 minutes today... kinda. I heard the alarm, and was sort of awake, but just lay in bed for... y'know, 5 minutes. When I checked the (super-accurate-to-1-millisecond-every-six-ice-ages-radio-synchronised-atomic) alarm clock '5 minutes later', however, it was 6.25. Gah.

Nonetheless, I still shaved, showered, walked Mali, got to work at the usual hour and all that. Still feel tired, though. Blech.

The washing machine at Castle Fox has gone on strike. I think the problem will be that the filter needs clearing out. Unfortunately, the Book of Words for the device insists that it possesses a 'self-cleaning' filter unfettered by the need for human interference (yes, my washing machine has its own Prime Directive), so this may be a job beyond my abilities (is there no beginning to my talents?). In the interim, I'll need to re-acquaint myself with the joys of the laundromat. Fortunately, brundle lent me Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser the other day, so at least I'll be able to make a start on that...

aome was asking whether Castle Fox was back on the net. The answer is yes. And no. And all points in between. It's mostly back, I think^*, but is somewhat tempremental, and even when the connection is up, the router's reporting the line speed as 460kbps, which is just a little shy of the purported 'Up to 12Mbps' that the account's quoted at. Hull is a monopoly for ISPs, so room for manouevre is limited, but yes, I really ought to mention it to someone at KC. That and the static filled line.

* Verily: give me certainty or give me something else

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Definitely not a good start to the day

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:57:04 GMT

Got in this morning to discover that the aircon in our server room had failed (the temp was up to 27°C), so several of the development servers have been taken down (the 27°C is the stable temp after that kit had been powered down for 12 hours).

Seperately, and independently, the network kit in a completely different building had also chosen the weekend just gone to curl up and die.

Overslept by 30 mins, and right atm I just want to go back home to bed, still feeling a bit... spaced, or whatever it was that had me feeling relatively under-par yesterday.

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Too Morning

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:20:38 GMT

Blech. I know I was still awake at 1am, and that I was awake again from 3 until at least 4.

To be fair, I do feel more awake now, after having walked Mali, than before we set out, so that's something, but my eyes feel tired already.

The current podcast is taken from the LSE's catalogue of public lectures, and is pretty good fun: the journalist David Aaronovitch is talking about his book Voodoo Histories, which is apparently about how and why conspiracy theories arise. The Q&A is rather entertaining.

Whilst we're on podcasts, I thought that Gillian Tett's Lecture Fool's Gold was another interesting LSE download, talking about the rise of the use of derivatives and other such things in the financial world, and how these led to the Credit Crunch.

Another excellent 'cast is Dr Albert Bartlett talking about the exponential function, and how this relates to population growth and energy consumption. I've only ever listened to the audio, so am presumably missing out on some of the slides and stuff, but there is, apparently, a Real Player (ick) stream.

More politically, WGBH Forum (why do American radio stations have names that are a scrabble bag selection of four tiles?) has Norm Chomsky introducing Robert Fisk's lecture War, Geopolitics and History. That page is a video stream, but from there you can download the MP3.

Another political cast that I liked was Michael Klare's discussion about the prospect of depleting energy resources fostering increased global conflict. I liked Klare's book Blood and Oil, but was less whelmed by his later tome, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. Still, I thought that the lecture (if that link points to the one I originally downloaded), was good.

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