welcome.

Ferrari Team Orders Egg On Face Fail. Facepalm. -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/26 08:02
More Fun With Cellphone Cameras. So, I have a new phone now, with a new camera. It does boring things like autofocus and flash and stuff. Fortunately, you can turn all that garbage off and just take photos with it too. -q- comments[4] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/21 09:26
Madiba Day. So, did you anything vaguely humanitarian for 67 minutes yesterday? G and I were a bit lame and didn't get to any of the many organised events happening around Joburg, so we just donned some crappy clothes and spent a couple hours picking up trash on the roads near where we live. It was quite an interesting experience. The first thing I realised was that I could probably be quite a good garbage man; it's a job that requires one to enter a state somewhat akin to meditation, the act of locating and containing junk out in the real world somehow reflecting a subconscious location and containment of junk in the mind. It was surprisingly relaxing. The second thing I realised was how unbelievably wasteful human beings are. I mean, one knows this, but knowledge of the problem often seems rather too abstract when confronted with the real thing. The road verge gave up dozens of half-eaten meals, unopened drinks, and piles of perfectly recyclable paper and glass, among other things. The third thing I realised was that it can send a message to people who otherwise wouldn't give a shit when you do stuff like this. A good few cars stopped at one of the intersections where I was wombling around, and a fair number of them made comments along the lines of, "oh wow, this place is a mess, I never noticed that before". If it makes just a few folks think twice before tossing trash out their car window, I'll consider it a success. More tomorrow. -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/19 07:28
Photos From Reindeerland And Chocolateland. Pics from our trip to Finland and Switzerland are up in the usual place. There are a lot. Sorry about that; there was a lot to see :-) Enjoy! -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/16 07:04
The Pale Blue Dot. In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its cameras around and took a photo of Earth from a record distance of over six billion kilometers: Astronomer, author, and general-purpose smart guy Carl Sagan had some stuff to say about this that you might enjoy as you chug down your morning dose of caffeine today. "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." More tomorrow. -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/13 08:36
And Then There Was One. Congratulations to Spain for winning the 2010 FIFA World Cup! More tomorrow. -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/07/12 10:09
34. It's a bit of an arb number, but it's what I turned today, so let's stretch our mathematical legs a bit. The first thing that springs to mind is that 34 is part of the Fibonacci sequence, described by the difference equation fn = fn-1 + fn-2. Given initial conditions of f0 = 1 and f1 = 1, it is the ninth such number. According to wikipedia, 34 is also a semi-prime, a natural number with only two prime factors. It's the ninth such natural number, which has an agreeable symmetry with the Fibonacci sequence. Okay, we're stretching here, and I can tell you're getting bored. Back to your coffee you ungrateful lot! ;-) W00t birthday... -q- comments[1] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/05/20 08:34
Hooray, Cricket Is Boring Again! Cricket was never meant to be exciting, entertaining, thrilling. The only edge-of-your-seat action that was ever intended to be part of the game was whether they'd serve scones or crumpets with tea. Cricket is the quintessential English gentleman's sport, designed to be played out in the open for five days solid with no guaranteed result in a country where it rains more often than not. Still, stiff upper lip and all that old chap; that's cricket. A while back some crazy person, probably one of Bernie Ecclestone's relatives, came along and thought that cricket could use some spicing up. A little pizazz to bring in the crowds, and thereby sell lots of advertising space to cigarette companies, and later mobile phone companies (which are really the same thing). So we got limited overs cricket. And the gods saw that it was good. You could play a whole game in one day and always get a result! You could try out lots of crazy rules and untested players because no one took it seriously!! Bowlers had to bowl out of their skins to survive, and batsmen could go completely berserk!!! The great unwashed masses of the world loved it!!!! Cigarettes (and later cellphones) sold by the metric ton!!!!! Stadia were packed out!!!!!! For a while. What happened then was that the essential cricketness of the game started to assert itself. Teams started taking the one-day game just as seriously as test cricket. Specialist players evolved for limited overs, and matches became elegant but frequently soulless chess games of strategy and counter-strategy. And rain still cocked everything up, despite lots of creative mathematics by Messrs. Duckworth and Lewis. That same crazy person who suggested it in the first place then woke up in his dirty alley, leaped out of his newspaper bed, and cried "Eureka!". People don't go to watch limited-overs matches any more because they take eight bloody hours and are often boring for seven and a half of those hours. The cellphone companies weren't able to push their product on unsuspecting victims, and were getting edgy. So we got T20 cricket. And the gods saw that it was good. You can play a whole game in three hours and always get a result! You can try out lots of crazy rules and untested players because no one takes it seriously!! Bowlers have to bowl out of their skins to survive, and batsmen can go completely berserk!!! The great unwashed masses of the world love it!!!! Cellphones (and later, whatever daft thing replaces them) are selling by the metric ton!!!!! Stadia are packed out!!!!!! For now. Last night, I tried, valiantly, to watch the T20 World Cup final between England and Australia. England won, I think. I fell asleep so often I'm having trouble discerning dreams from reality; I'm pretty sure Australia didn't send Barney the Purple Dinosaur out to bat at number 7. The bits I saw were not really a surprise, though I'd hoped we'd have a couple more years' grace before I first spotted this in the extra-short version of the game - it was boring. The teams have started taking it too seriously again, and while the rot might have only just started in the most important game in the T20 world, I suspect it'll filter down to every other match pretty fast. I don't really know what the alley-way bum is going to come up with next, though I hope it's not just "shorten the game even more!". There seems to be a bit of a law of diminishing returns in there somewhere, one feels that at some point the essential character of the sport will be lost and it'll be a stretch to even call it "cricket" any more. Also, we're ending up with far too many forms of the game here. Two is barely manageable, three is silly, and four would be insane. Perhaps we can keep the best elements of one-day and T20 cricket and come up with some novel replacement for both to try out (no, I don't know what; if I knew that I'd be the alley-way ideas guy, right?). Whatever happens, there's going to have to be some heavy lateral thinking methinks. Suggest your crackpot ideas in the comments! More tomorrow. -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/05/17 13:24
Photos! As promised many times before but shamefully never delivered by your errant and easily-distracted webmaster, photos of various recent events are finally up in the usual place. Collections from the trip to Durban last December, Terrace Bay fishing expedition, and our first wedding anniversary at Golden Gate may be found there for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy! -q- comments[0] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/04/18 17:43
Anniversary Happenings! G and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary this weekend in grand style, on top of the Drakensberg. Hard to believe it's already been a year, time really does fly when you're having fun :-). Love you Gabs, here's to another fifty at least... Got the most awesome gift from my better half, a TomTom XL GPS (or "satnav", for our English readers). It was put to the test navigating us down to Golden Gate for the weekend and I'm sure it'll get plenty of use in the future. Photos will be up soon (this time I mean it!) More tomorrow. -q- comments[2] | rss	Posted by: quinn 2010/04/06 09:55

This webspace is maintained by Quinn Reynolds 3rd September 2010