The contraversal Scallop on Aldebugh beach is interesteing. I’m not sure what to make of it. Maggi Hambling sees it a tribute to Benjamin Britten.
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Inspired by Tintin in Vol 714 Pour Sydney, the kids are currently well into playing Battleships.
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These scary images arrived in a round-robin email under the apt title “would you use it?”. They’re apparently from an art installation by Monica Bonvicini as reported by BBC last year, though i think these are from a more recent exhibition in Switzerland. In answer to the question: i’d give it a go, but would mentally recite the 13 times table to stave off the old avoidant paruresis.

Robert Kay blogs about an inspiring talk given by Damian Conway in which he brought together Conway’s (no relation) Game of Life, Maxwell’s Demon along side the Klingon and Perl languages! He references Paul Rendell’s Life Turing Machine which was new to me and is simply amazing. There are some cracking demos of various components on the details page, one of my favourites being the Finite State Machine from which the above snapshot was taken.

Well that’s a first - Google currently returning an error instead of seach results.

Update: now the subject of a BBC report. Looks like a myDoom mutant is hammering Google here in the UK. Sadly reported on the Radio 4 19:00 bulletin as ‘Google is suffering from a virus attack’ which gives the mistaken impression that Google runs Microsoft software :-(

Update: an explanation from Google isn’t that impressive - i got the error from work and home, as did several others in the UK.

The excellent Sean McGrath is giving the closing keynote at XMLOpen in Cambridge this September. In my own bid for glory, i’m giving one of the first sessions on the Wednesday morning - Versioning XML and Open Source Tools. Should be fun!

My Andy Goldsworthy inspired stone circle on Southwold beach.

We came back from a week’s holls yesterday only to realise it was actually our 10th wedding anniversary! What gave the game away were some nice cards and flowers from our inlaws and outlaws, including this nice bowl. My mother says she found it in a charity shop in Berkhamsted, which raises a few possibilities:

• we were given it as a wedding present and offloaded it .. nope!
• there is another Lucy & Paul somewhere out there and they offloaded it .. maybe.
• the parallel L&P got divorced and it was one of the few items Lucy didn’t hurl across the kitchen at Paul .. quite likely!
• My mother actually commissioned it from a cheesy advert in the back of Torygraph Saturday magazine but is too embarrassed to admit to it .. i think we have a winner!

Anyway, the real Lucy has just filled it with brazil nuts .. yum!

Roseberry Topping is an interesting shaped hill close to where i was brought-up in North Yorkshire. I passed it on the way back to Saltburn last weekend and couldn’t resist taking a couple of snaps.
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allofmp3.com is tempting, and apparently legitimate, within Russian copyright laws that is. Anyway it’s a lesson to itunes on how to run a music service: lots of music, lots of options on quality and format, and a charging model based upon data downloaded, not per-song. Oh, and it’s $0.01 per megabyte, so you can download ~15 CD quality tracks for the price of one lossy compressed itune. Now all i need to do is pluck up the courage to enter my credit card number into a Russian web site ..

Independent? review