Send me a physical Christmas card and I’ll think kindly of you and feel bad for not sending you one myself. Send me a digital Christmas card and I’ll think badly of you and feel kind for not hassling you with my own badly designed, half-assed attempt at spreading seasonal bollocks.
After half a lifetime of dreaming about it, I’ve finally started building a robot. It’s based on a remote controlled tank, an Android mobile phone and a IOIO board which connects the two via USB.
I’m enjoying reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. It’s a good introduction to the basic concepts of economics disguised as an exposé on the hidden motives of the world around you.
I just wrote a letter to my MP and thought it would be worth sharing here.
I wrote to East Midlands Trains last week to claim a refund for a cancelled train. Yesterday I received this reply:
I read an interesting letter yesterday from Ecotricity, my electricity supplier. I received it a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t opened it because i thought it was a bill!
The car doctor unexpectedly had the car valeted, washed and partially resprayed. It looks pretty good now so I felt I had to do something about the junk that has accumulated inside. Here is a selection of the things I found.
“Flying produces a fraction of global greenhouse gases” says the reassuring sticker on the seat in front of me. “Ah, well that’s nice. Now that I don’t feel guilty about flying I think I’ll book another holiday!”
But, just for fun, lets look at those stats a little closer…
So it’s Monday again and… what it’s Tuesday? Where did Monday go? And I’ve got to do what by the end of the week? If being back at work after a bank holiday weekend of basking in the sun is making you feel a little stressed, here are some cool things to cheer you up.
- Festo AirJelly – a flying jellyfish airship thing. Very calming.
- Clock Sculpture – 150 separate hands that rotate to spell out the name of the current hour
- One Day Poem Pavillion – holes drilled in the ‘pavillion’ form patterns on the floor which spell out a different poem every hour
- Do web sites need to look exactly the same in everybrowser? – unambiguously answers one question
- Lip Dub Stars – turn up the volume for this one!
I’ve just been without electricity for half an hour while the landlady installed our new oven and I helped her carry the old one out to the bins. I suppose I could just as easily view it as an enforced exercise break
