Nick Gibbins

Flange!

I suppose that it’s all my own fault, really. In October, I wrote that I’d done a piece for a promotional DVD at work and had managed to work the word ‘flange’ into my contribution for a bet. Before you ask, it is perfectly possible to use ‘flange’ in a non-obscene manner when describing the Semantic Web. As it happened, this ended up making it through to the final cut for the DVD. It’s not too bad, though I still hate the sound of my own voice. Oh, the irony. A couple of weeks ago, the social secretary for my… Read More »Flange!

Buy this game: Darwinia

Off to Bristol before nine this morning, to go to IKEA and thence to John Lewis at Cribbs Causeway. Nowt much to speak of in general (looking at kitchens), but I did pop into Virgin and pick up a copy of Darwinia, which is easily the most innovative and nifty game that I’ve played in a while. In fact, since I played the last game by these guys, the rather good Uplink. If Uplink was a novel hacking simulation games, then Darwinia is an artificial life real-time strategy game with a gestural interface. Both of these games are from Introversion… Read More »Buy this game: Darwinia

One for the Potterites

There’s a Grauniad article (secondary reporting from The Sun) on suspicious betting patterns in Bungay, Suffolk (the location of the printers of the previous five HP books) which point to the identity of the major character which JKR has said will die in the sixth book. Very interesting. William Hill are apparently no longer taking bets on the character concerned. (Grauniad article contains potential spoilers, naturally)

BOFFIN!!!

Boffin wins prize for EPrints project, as The Register put it. An all-round good result for for his work freeing the academic literature.

On musical puns

There’s a TV advert for a car company (Vauxhall, it turns out) that’s playing at the moment which has a rather catchy bossa nova cover of Depeche Mode’s I Just Can’t Get Enough. Last night, I finally got around to trying to find out who the cover was by. Thanks to teh powah of teh intahweb, I discovered that it was by a French band called Nouvelle Vague (flash). What’s more, their eponymous first album is a collection of bossa nova covers of various New Wave classics, as they describe it – they stretch the definition quite far to include… Read More »On musical puns

Incredible Inedibles

Lunches at WWW2005 this week have been pretty poor on the whole, being a semi-Westernised selection of mediocre rubbish. We thought that we’d seen the worst when we found that the croissants had hot dog sausages in the middle, but we hadn’t counted on today’s masterpiece. That is not a chicken drumstick with rickets. That is an undercooked salami-style sausage, brimming with health-giving nitrates, that’s been molded around a piglet rib. The mind, she boggles.

Kampai!

In Japan, you can buy frozen plum wine in department stores. This is a Good Thing.