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Month: August 2005

As the flat burns down…

Well, not quite… Just as I was making the last post I looked out of the window to see the railway arches on fire, belching smoke. The view is over the canal to the railway arches off Chester Road in Manchester. Ahh, made me feel homesick for London 😉

Fairy outfits

In Jesus Green, Vicky’s taking 5 while Manon and Alice attempt to reach takeoff velocity in their fairy outfits…

Google Talk and Jabber

Google Talk | MacMegasite

Google’s new service, ‘Talk’ made a front page splash on today’s FT with talk of a move away from ‘organising information’ to becoming a ‘portal for everything you want to do online’. They didn’t mention the new ‘open standards’ that Google would be using/inventing, but MacMegasite have revealed that the underpinnings are Jabber‘s standards which are in use. Excellent!

There’s also details of how to configure your IM client… Just done that and I’m not in splendid isolation as the online person I know on Google Talk! I’m sure that won’t last long, but in the meantime I’m going to try and work out what it’s going to add to my life, over and above the AIM, MSM, YIM, Jabber and IRC accounts I already have…

Boys have willies, what do girls have?

The Observer | Magazine | Q&A: The Agony Aunt

Q Boys have willies. What do girls have? This is a serious question and I’d like an answer – soon (well, at least before they reach puberty). I have two-year-old twin girls. We’re potty training at the moment and they know the name for all their body parts, bar one. Vagina is too technical, and fanny – though I don’t mind the word – some people think is rude. As a child I used willy, but others tell me this is only for boys and will cause confusion.

This letter was sent in to Mariella Frostrup’s agony page by a friend of ours, after we’d been discussing the important topic of what our girls should call their ‘willies’. Now that they’re going through potty training this is a more important topic than one would initially have thought – especially given the propensity to shout whichever term you decide upon across restaurants, parks or friends’ houses…

‘Willy’ is a pretty coy term, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalently asexual equivalent for ‘girl willy’. Whatever our views, Mariella’s answer is pretty superficial: if we’d needed a thesaurus there’d have been no need to ask her.

Then again, I’m not even sure why Leslie did ask her…? A bigger mystery, imho, than our current problem with ‘naming conventions’.

RSS sidebar of del.icio.us posts

[inpo] in no particular order

Just managed to get a my del.icio.us feed into the right-hand sidebar included as a nicely displayed feed.

I first saw this on Giles Turnbull’s site and wondered how to achieve the same effect. Giles’ weblog (and his delicious posts) are a must-read imho and it made me realise that there are only two important things you need to know about someone online: what they write and where they browse!

Anyway, thanks to reading the source on Giles’ page I realise that there’s a javascript feed from delicious and that you can pull and format it. The line of code can be seen in the HTML source.

It seems to have picked up the CSS and looks fine. I hadn’t expected that (!) but since I’m working this out as I go along I think I’ll leave well alone.

UPDATE: 2008-03-25: my site’s changed, Giles’ has changed, but there’s now an easy way to generate the script on the delicious site: https://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls

International Federation of Competitive Eating

Really, this ‘tongue in cheek’ yet earnest site should be in the ‘webshite’ category, but “Stuff” was too easy a pun to miss..

In case you thought this was just a recent craze…

Competitive eating is among the most diverse, dynamic and demanding sports in history. It dates back to the earliest days of mankind and stands alongside original athletic pursuits such as running, jumping and throwing. If you have 30 hungry Neanderthals in a cave and rabbit walks in, that is a competitive eating situation. Of course, in the last two centuries competitive eating has been practiced with somewhat more formality.

International Federation of Competitive Eating – IFOCE

Linked from a BBC News article.

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