yonmei

12:48 pm: To do list till April
I have just been working out my To Do list till the end of March. For work, that is, though it includes such stuff as two weeks annual leave over Christmas.

One of my colleagues, USHomosamurai (who went back to the US a couple of years ago) asked me once why the British financial year runs from 1st April to 31st March. I didn't know, but was able to tell her that in Samuel Pepys time, the year's number changed on 1st April - his diary makes that clear. So the habit of changing the year's number on the 1st of January is something less than four hundred years old, but - I was able to work this out from first principles - can't be very much less, because the US cloned its calendar from the UK in the 18th century, and the US (say American friends) has financial and calendar year running concurrently.

But why (asked USHomosamurai) would the new year ever have started on 1st April? I thought about it, and shrugged: "Could be because the Roman Empire's New Year began 1st April, and you know how bureaucrats are...."

I don't care for today's XKCD. It's cruel to physics lecturers.

I did, however, love last night's House episode, even if it was rather cruel to House. Cruelty to House is what makes fanfic fun. ( light spoilers for what's either 6.8 or 6.9 depending how you're counting )

I have finished writing the skeleton of my Yuletide story.



Tags: house md, to do lists, work, xkcd, yuletide

08:03 am: I have to go to the dentist this morning
*unhappy platypus*

(And I have lost my cool black MP3 player. :-( If someone handed it in at the Teviot from Saturday... *hopes*)




omg XKCD

Tags: dentist panic, lost mp3 player, tolkien, xkcd

09:48 am: Tweeting questions
tzikeh asked on twitter hey kids - what's the difference between mathematics and arithmetic?

The answers I left didn't show up in the @tzikeh search list:

The same difference as between the Americas and the US: mathematics is the whole continent, arithmetic is one land within it.

Arithmetic is the country of integers, rational numbers, real numbers, or complex numbers: added, multiplied, taken away, or divided.

Maths is the continent of structure, order, & relationships of counting, measuring, and describing the shape of the universe.

What answer would you give?





Tags: a stranger is a friend you don't like ve, meta meta post, questions questions questions, twitter, xkcd

02:04 pm: The subject line has nothing to do with the post.


I can't say I would ever be this bad, but it's mostly because I would never get married wearing a tux unless my beloved were also wearing a tux. [Update: Hm. My visual imagination seems to have invented the tux: the pastor stick figure is wearing pastor-robes, the bride stick figure is wearing foofy white dress, but the other stick figure is just a stick figure not wearing anything. Perhaps it's the kind of nightmare where you suddenly realise you're standing in a public space doing something very important with everyone looking at you... but you're NAKED. ...or maybe it's just typical cartoon sexism, as when XKCD indicates a stick figure is female by drawing long hair?] And I truly cannot imagine ever wanting to get married to someone who wanted to wear a foofy white dress to the ceremony. Whatever her name was.

Anyway. This isn't today's XKCD, but today's XKCD is kind of disturbing. So.

It's my mother's birthday today. She's 74. We're meeting this evening for a pizza and a film. Either something from the 1960s with Dirk Bogarde, whom my mother has bizarrely never seen in the cinema, or something from the 21st century about two women smuggling illegal immigrants into Canada, which my mother thinks she will like because she's Canadian. The pizza will be delectable. I expect I'll enjoy either of the films she opts for.

My birthday present to her this year is afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel on Sunday. I did momentarily think of offering her afternoon tea at the cafe next door, but actually I'd quite like to keep that a secure harbour. Besides, she will like the afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel: it's basically an enormous leisurely meal. This means running away from a picnic that HoF are organising, but I can live with that.

I still haven't told them I'm going to Canada in August. I just got the e-mail from the volunteers coordinator inquiring if we want to do pre-con work, and e-mailed back to say, yes, Wednesday morning and Thursday.

I want pink and summer dragons! Give clicky!


Tags: family stuff, worldcon, xkcd

10:18 am: XKCD is wrong on the Internet


I sit on the train or the bus and look at all the people and get a high on thinking how each one of them has the same awesomely complex mind/memories looking out from behind their eyes: whole worlds inside them. Who doesn't get excited about that?




Tags: xkcd

08:37 pm: 413 nanohertz


25 days, actually. Still. Ibuprofin now, please.




Tags: bloody bloody bloody, xkcd

11:59 pm: Okay, so: the character list meme!
Hmmm, when xkcd is just depressing and even lolcats don't do more than raise a smile...


moar funny pictures

I need distracting. And lexin was doing it! (Listing characters, I mean, obviously)

I have made a list of 15 fictional characters.

Ask me questions about one or more of these characters by number, and I will respond (eventually...) with an answer.





Tags: fannishness, lists, meme, xkcd

11:07 pm: I hate chess.





I... think I may have driven my co-worker away with Blazing Saddles. (I am now watching Double Jeopardy.) We did get an hour or so's report work done, and I fed him mushroom kasha, when he would otherwise have fallen into a coma with cheap pizza.

I have a long vent to vent about work, but better not just now.

Tags: bloody work, dragon eggs need clicky, xkcd

11:59 am: Message for Peter David


(Not that it will do him a lot of good, at this moment in time. A classic XKCD time machine which looks rather like a giant hamster ball, and which enables him to go back in time to the day he thought it would be a good idea to shut down scans_daily for being rude about one of his comics, make out with himself, and between warm passionate kisses on his own mouth*, whisper "No: it is not a good idea to become known as the comics writer who got scans_daily suspended from livejournal"? A much better idea.)

(If you do not know what I am talking about: Thoughts on Scans_Daily and Peter David, scans_daily suspended, The Death (and resurrection) of Scans_Daily, Editorial: Livejournal Kills Scans_Daily. Oh, and possibly the best, a double-letter addressed to Scans_daily fans and Peter David: And I Shall Call It Dumbassopalooza: scans_daily and Peter David.)

*"Making out with yourself" is an XKCD meme.

Incidentally, I see Peter David is asserting that yes, he sic'd Marvel's lawyers on Scans_Daily, but he's sure that it was just coincidence that LJ Abuse shut down Scans_Daily two days later because Marvel say their legal team hadn't had time to investigate. Having had some direct experience of LJ Abuse's willingness to shut down and suspend anything or anyone who might remotely be suspected of someday causing Livejournal trouble, I'm actually fairly sure that LJ Abuser saw Peter David's notification that he was going to Marvel Comics, passed the word on to the head borg, and the community got suspended before Marvel could take off their visor and blaze Livejournal to the ground. Seems a lot more likely than the "just coincidence": but it's the only defense he's got. "I meant to shut it down, but I didn't actually do it".

All he's accomplished (since Scans_Daily promptly moved to insanejournal) is to ensure that all regular members of that community are plenty damn mad at him, to spread his name far and wide... and to give scans_daily a new home on Insanejournal. Welcome to the asylum.




Tags: lj abuse did what???, online situations, outcasts should stick together, xkcd