Nick Gibbins

AKICILJ: Calling all biologists

So, does anyone know if slow worms externally fertilise their eggs? I’ve inadvertently decapitated the male of the slow worm pair that lives in our garden while giving the front lawn its first cut of the year. The female is alive and well, and by her plumpness seems heavy with eggs. She’s been relocated to the back garden (which is where they’ve nested in previous years), hopefully to lay in peace. Also, does anyone know how large their territories are? I haven’t seen any other slow worms in the immediate area (bar a juvenile that we found when we demolished… Read More »AKICILJ: Calling all biologists

A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

These days, I use a Mac for all of my day-to-day computing, but I’ve never really got to grips with Mail.app, preferring to use Thunderbird instead. I also use GMail in a limited capacity for non-work mail, and I’ve been starting to look at the OS X Address Book (which ties in nicely with a whole bunch of things). Unfortunately, Thunderbird, Address Book and GMail all use different standards for importing and exporting contact information: Address Book Exports: vCard, Address Book Archive (package containing an sqlite database) Imports: vCard, LDIF, Address Book Archive Thunderbird Exports: LDIF, TSV (of some kind),… Read More »A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

Dead dog in alley this morning

All things considered, we’re doing pretty poorly at seeing films in the cinema of late. Finally dragged myself off to see Watchmen last night, which meant the late night slot (2245) at the big Odeon in town (not my favourite cinema). Overall, I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t the film I’d hoped it would be. , you can stop your sniggering now and just say “I told you so”.

Watching the Watchmen

Rorschach’s Livejournal Ombudsmen: Scott Kurtz parody with cameos from the funny pages Hitler finds out that there is no giant psychic death squid

Oscar Nominee Meme

Doing the rounds in abbreviated form from various people. I’ve decided to mutate the meme, because 1980 feels like a very artificial start date for film-watching. The full list is taken from here; for each year, the first film listed won the Oscar. Titles in bold are ones that I’ve seen.

Busy Bees Vouchers and the Demons of Stupidity

Today is a good day. I’ve managed to stop the personal details (including addresses, National Insurance numbers, and payment histories) of over one hundred thousand people from leaking from a ‘web’ application of such calamitous stupidity that it beggars belief. As some of you may know, in the UK there is a salary sacrifice scheme (and tax benefit) that allows parents to part-pay for childcare from their gross salaries; parents arrange with their employers to buy childcare vouchers which may then be redeemed with nurseries, etc. There are a number of childcare voucher providers, but for most people their choice… Read More »Busy Bees Vouchers and the Demons of Stupidity

Conversations with toddlers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprimates

recounted a conversation that had with Thea, on the subject of apes and monkeys, which got me browsing aimlessly through Wikipedia. I came across an article on Yerkish, an artificial language designed in the 1970s for use by non-human primates, principally chimpanzees. Yerkish has a vocabulary of symbols (lexigrams) which are used to label buttons on a keyboard, and has a relatively complex grammar. The paper referenced in the Wikipedia article (a scan of a microfiche version of a typed paper original) has an appendix of conversations with Lana (the first chimpanzee to have learned Yerkish) that were so close… Read More »Conversations with toddlers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprimates

OMGWTFBBQ: Guardian magazine

Well, I for one wasn’t expecting to see (with part of his collection) in the paper… Edited to add: : Hasn’t he () said anything on his LJ? No? Maybe he’s being modest. <pause> Bwah-hah-hah-hah!