As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the snow has finally arrived. For me, this meant a three hour drive home on a Friday night, so I wasn’t best pleased. Some people, however, thought it was great.
After some climbing and a bit of low speed sledging (the drive is steep enough for Macsen to launch himself, but not long enough for him to really pick up speed), we started looking for more fun things to do in the snow. Luckily, I had a broom.
… and it’s late. Again.
I have to say that the weather has been terribly disorganised since they privatised it. Going home on a Friday night is not the ideal day to be facing snow related delays.
On a more positive note, I have made a massive dent in my podcast queue.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Fox News before, and it’s certainly not a channel I feel any need to pay any attention to. But this is incredible:
Here’s the pull quote, from Bill O’Reilly, starting at 2:40.
The way they do the statistics in the Netherlands is different, plus its a much smaller country, it’s a much smaller base to do the stats on.
So my question is this: Is Bill O’Reilly really as statistically illiterate as he appears, or is he just assuming that his entire audience is made up of morons?
I started this year with the intention of blogging more regularly. Specifically, I wanted to try to put up at least one post a day. Surprisingly enough, once month in, I am managing to do so.
It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and, gratifyingly, I have found that I am spending a lot less time on various social networks and a lot more time doing and reading stuff that actually interests me. I think the take-home point here is that, while a lot of social networking activity does provide the instant gratification of an immediate response, it is also very easy to allow it to become too much of a time sink.
I do prefer the longer, slightly slower, approach that blogging necessitates. Counter-intuitively, I have also found that this is a lot less time consuming – and a lot more satisfying – than trying to express myself in the shorter form encouraged by social networks. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, and I have to acknowledge that this is not a heavily trafficked blog, blogging doesn’t feel like a live conversation in the same way that microblogging does. As such, I don’t worry about how quickly I release or respond to comments and an quite happy to engage in conversations that develop more slowly and (hopefully) more thoughtfully.
Secondly, and related to the first point, is the fact that I am increasingly recognising that there are some issues which I do think are important but about which I have nothing to add. While it is easy to tweet, dent or plus a link to some news article or online opinion, seeking to actually write a blog post is pushing me towards focusing more actively on things about which I actually have something to say.
That’s not to say that social networks are a bad thing and I have gained a lot of entertainment from them, but I do think it is useful to recognise just how much of a time sink and an echo chamber these things can be.
I started blogging way back in December 2002 and, for a long time, I got a great deal out of it. Over the last three or four years, I have blogged less as I became increasingly distracted by various social networks. I’m not about to abandon social networking – identi.ca is a great place to talk to smart people and Google+ is a handy way of posting links about which I have little to say – but I do find that blogging works best for me and is something that I am finding increasingly easy to maintain.
Last week, a lot of the tech press was full of the news that a pair of enterprising Canadian students had managed to send a Lego minifig into space. Now Captain Barry Wiszniowski, chairman of the Air Canada Pilots Association’s safety division, has whined that launching Legonauts could represent a “concern to aviation”.
Wiszniowski said: “I think in the 25 years that I’ve been flying I’ve seen two weather balloons that passed on one side of the aircraft or the other.”
Not exactly a major threat to air traffic, then…
The students, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, do appear to have been reasonably diligent in ensuring that they weren’t doing anything dangerous or illegal and University of Toronto astrophysics professor Michael Reid said of the achievement: “It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness. For two 17-year-olds to accomplish this on their own is pretty impressive.”
Maybe Captain Wiszniowski would be happier if the students had just made some bombs, like they do in Belgium.
Anyway, here’s a video of the Legonaut in action.
Those were angry clouds I drove through to get home tonight.
It’s been a long weekend over which we have enjoyed one of the smellier parts of parenting, and one of those parts that no-one reeally talks about. But we’ve made it and I am now heading to work where I can enjoy the comparative peace of only having to deal with three simultaneous disasters.
So here’s a video tribute to the greatest drug ever discovered. I have the feeling that I may be getting through quite a lot of this today.
The sky was a gorgeous red this morning as I drove into work, and this snap from my phone completely fails to capture it.
I was, of course, intending to post this this morning but things have been a little hectic today. So enjoy the post-lunch lull as much as I hope to.
It’s been pointed out to me that the contact form on this site wasn’t actually working. This is now fixed and you are free to message me to your heart’s content. As long as it’s not too much.
I shall also take this opportunity to mention that if I do break the contact form again, you can also get in touch with me via either Identi.ca or Google+.
Five days into 2012 and it’s cold, wet and windy. Much the same as any northern January, really but we all made it one more time around the Sun and that’s as good an excuse as any to celebrate. And celebrate we did.
The start of a new calendar is also, for many people, a time to make unkeepable resolutions. This is something I try to avoid – unkeepable resolutions are things I make throughout the year – but one thing I do want to try to achieve this year is to keep this blog regularly updated. My target, at the moment, is to try and manage one post a day on whatever subject happens to catch my interest.
I don’t expect anyone to find all of it interesting to them and most people, I am sure, will find none of it to be particularly interesting. But that’s okay because I’m doing this for me.
And since I’m sitting here, getting all meta and stating the obvious, I have also been playing around with this blog’s theme options. It’s now a lot lighter and a little greyer and I am quickly getting used to it.
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