friday round up including cool science

todays friday round up is a role reversal where you tell me a blog that is a) regularly updated and b) good to read.

in other news, some cool science facts:

1) everyone sees their own rainbows.
the angle that the light makes through the rain drops to your eyes is unique for each person. the only time you'll share a rainbow is when seeing a picture.

2) coastlines
coastlines are of indeterminate length. well, you can determine them, but the length depends on the tool used to measure them. the bigger the 'ruler' the shorter the coastline.
eg imagine using a one kilometre ruler. you wouldn't be able to get into many ins and outs.
now using a one metre ruler there's loads more ins and outs you can use.
and so on.
coastlines can be compared if you use the same ruler size for different countries although that won't be a perfect comparison as each coastline will have different amounts of ins and outs (that's definitely the technical term, yeah).

and with those two thoughts, i run off into the sunset to find a new job now that my boss has quit. and isn't the perfect human being i thought he was. until we meet again.

are you mugging me off?

as per usual, on my way home after a drunken night out i fell asleep on the nightbus. well, only a little bit and i did well enough to be awake at my stop.
i live a ten minute walk from the bus stop.
i had one ear phone in as i like music. i was walking home in what i can only describe as a happy style. at one point i did a full circle and noticed two people in the distance.
about 15 seconds later i heard footsteps and one guy appeared on my right, saying
"mate, have you got the time?"
(translation for non londoners: "mate, i'm about to mug you")

this has happened since school, i thought.
"no", i replied.
well, i didn't. and even i if did, i have no time for people like him.

no sooner had i responded when his mate grabbed me from behind and appeared to be trying to take my jacket off by lifting it over my head. a strange attack.

i wasn't really sure what to do. part of me (the drunken part) didn't want to kick him in the nuts in case i antagonised them, as they weren't doing a great job so far.
another part of me (also a drunken part) wanted to hit him as hard as i could.

i shouted help a few times to see if that would scare them into quitting but it didn't. then his mate decided to join in and kicked me in the arse. that was much more confusing than it was painful.

i decided to just start shoving this guy attacking me from behind. i also decided to shout "fuck off, i haven't got anything on me"
this combination of actions seemed to do the trick as he let go and quizzically repeated "you haven't got anything on you?"

i took this opportunity to run away.

(in hindsight, it happily appears i was attacked by the worst muggers ever.)

a few minutes later i was home, drunk on alcohol and high on adrenalin.

the worst part is that i woke up the next morning after less than 5 hours sleep. damn my work afflicted body clock!

i found a new thing that scares me

wall climbing. i think other people call it rock climbing but it's in doors and on a wall. many things scare me about this experience. it's far away. i'm surrounded by people. some of them watch me fail in my attempts to climb walls.

it's a place where the walls aren't high so you don't need ropes. and thus the thing that scares me most is falling off. i imagine falling badly. hitting the wall many times on my way down and landing on my face. it hasn't happened yet, but there's always a point near the top of the wall where i know i wouldn't land safely if i fell and i have to do a reach of faith for the next little grip for my fingers to hold on to.
my wall balance is also quite poor so i don't have much confidence yet, even though i am yet to fall.

todays friday blog round up will remind you to read my blog. and remind me to write my blog. sometimes i read old stuff i write and i do a laugh. that makes me happy.

i would also like to describe a superpower i have, one which many of the population share. it's the ability to predict rain accurately within the next 5 minutes. i can just feel a drop in pressure. an old colleague had it following an injury (real superhero backstory for him) where the pressure drop lead to pain in his previously injured joints, at which point he knew that meant rain. happily i can do this without the pain.
so just now i brought the washing in as i felt an imminent onset of rain. i am happy to report it's now raining.

it's getting cold

winter is heading this way. summer was fleeting, and while the sun may be shining, it is deceptive in its projection of the warmth of the outdoors.

While hiding from the outdoors, today, I will attempt to see how many press ups then sit ups then press ups then sit ups (etc) I can do till collapse.

If necessary, I will limit situps to as many as I can do 2 minutes since i think i can do more of them.

Here goes:

Pressups - 17
situps - 50
Pressups - 6
situps - 30
Pressups - 4
situps - 20
Pressups - n/a
situps -

clearly, 2 minutes was optimistic for a limit.

and now, lunchtime. with added creatine.

friday round up

the more astute of you will have noticed it's not friday. well, fuck you. my blog, my rules.

the past week has seen future queen kate get her tits out in public and complain when someone took a pic. i like that the comparison in fuss kicked up between that incident and the one over harry galvanting around in private completely naked with pics taken - when no one cared in the slightest.

mid september is already upon us and the days are getting shorter and colder. i need to quit my job before winter is in. i don't want to get up and go outside in the very cold. plus it would necessitate buying a suit coat and shopping is one thing i always try to avoid.

that said, i did buy some protein shakes this past week. that and creatine should help me out gain the last 5kg i require to achieve my weight goal. i was then thinking of learning some martial arts. however, it has come to my attention that the person that wins a fight is not the biggest person, the strongest, nor even the best technical fighter. (i'm talking about real fights here, not competition fighting). the winner is the greater nutcase. the person who literally doesn't care what happens to themselves.

this trait is very noticeable with smaller people and i believe gives rise to the well known phenomenon of 'little man syndrome.'

as for a blog round up, well yorksha pudding seems to be blogging a bit more so go check it out. i like the writings. sadly, i don't think i'll ever find anything as good as yakshi and it seems unfair to give him the weekly award every week.

oh, and with curb starting again soon, here's one of my favourite scenes from it

act now darling, urges osborne

a misplaced comma and that would have been the headline.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19310258

i imagine that this would have been the reply:
"that was an unhelpful intervention, osborne. and don't call me darling."

i can't believe it's been a week since i posted.

on occasional Fridays over the past few weeks i've been telling long forgotten bloggers to pull their fingers out. firstly, rubbish has started posting again. rubbish by name, not rubbish by postings.

amazingly, the austrian vunderkid jethro also did a posting!

and finally just this week alex (that hot swiss one) decided to do some posting again.

while i may have been slow to get them posting, and perhaps i can't take all teh credit for it, i seem to have done quite well.

i have lots of draft posts that i haven't got round to posting. i really should start doing that more regularly.

today i found out one of my coworkers is on 3* the salary of me! i think 2 of me could do what he does. especially if one of me was highly motivated. maybe i should ask for a pay rise.

powerlympics

so i took the afternoon off work to go see the powerlympics. i got tickets to cycling because it's a great sport.

they have a time trial over 1000m where people off differing levels of handicap can compete and there is a time adjustment to make it fair. c1 get the most time, c3 have no time change and c2 is somewhere in between. the scientist in me wondered how they work it out, but it was far too confusing to see a pattern.

i also have conflicting feelings of sorrow for the athletes because of their disabilities combined with immense awe at their courage and convictions. there were some very impressive athletes!

here are some cool pictures. a silver medallist brit, a gold medallist brit, and a shot of the crowd. finishing with my favourite pic of the day, where i messed around with the shutter speed and followed some cyclists to get them pretty steady in the picture, but the background a blur.

a day in the life of...

...an introvert.

i wake up. silence. not even a single thought in my head. no fears, no hopes, no highs and no lows. if i was able to have a thought I would think that this fleeting moment is bliss.
all too soon i can hear noise. some big, some small. i like the sound of trains in the distance. it lets me know that everything is ok. and it reminds me of her.
back to noise and i realise that it will be like this for the rest of the day. machines, people, nature, constant. some i get to ignore, and to some i have to respond.
sometimes i get caught up in what i'm doing and nothing will affect me. those moments are rare - usually i'm be putting in effort just to function.

having a job and being essentially surrounded for 10-12 hours per day makes things harder. by the time that's over i don't want to talk to anyone. anyone gets offended by this because they think i'm being rude. i'm just trying to clear my mind, be able to relax and improve myself.

i think i'd like to go away somewhere for 6-12 months and just live alone. somewhere empty and quiet. the fields of mongolia perhaps. if only i knew how to get food from somewhere other than a supermarket.

and then, the end of the day, and as i start to drift off to sleep, sounds are amplified, some real, some in my head. i try to forget i'll have to do this all tomorrow and instead attempt to focus on the good things i aim to do.
every day i hope it will be easier for me than yesterday, but i don't even know what i can try to achieve that.
i know i'll always be able to cope; i want to do more than just cope.

the best comment of the olympics

i saw daley get bronze celebrate like he'd won, except what really struck me was the chinese guy who got second crying with his silver. this picture i saw today sums those moments up

but what i heard today about the Korean lady who won the gold in archery was amazing. She apologised to her country for winning by shooting an 8. "In Korea, we do not shoot 8s" she said. amazing.

live poker!

i did a poker in real life, and it was just as unexciting as i remember.

about 20 people turned up, and only top 3 paid with winner getting 58% it seemed rather top heavy. i don't have many interesting hands to report. i folded aqo from the sb against an utg open which may have been a bit tight. didn't want to call or 3bet but in hindsight probably should have 3bet.

ended up doing a deal with 4 left. i have no idea how to calculate icm but when i got home i checked online and it seemed pretty close except for the guy in second getting a bit screwed. i'd pointed this out to him whilst making the deal but he wasn't at all bothered. it had got a bit crapshooty with stacks of 30-70k and big blind being 3k, but there was probably decent play for one more level. maybe next time i should suggest one more level and then a chop. also that might tighten them up so i could steal more! (though i may be giving them more credit than i should)

in other news, i have decided just this second to resurrect "Friday blog resurrections".
For those of you that have forgotten, this is where i tell people who probably don't read my blog to resume blogging because i enjoyed their thoughts on a page.

so rubbish, alexandra and kevin, it's your time to shine.

i'm off to eat some pancakes and maybe enjoy some sunshine.

the money mess relationship

i couldn't think of a catchier name. sorry. but here's what happened:

i went to halfords to buy some wind screen wipers for my car. i returned home to fit them myself, didn't really know what i was doing but how hard can it be? well, as i was clipping on the first wiper it broke. i may have been doing it completely wrong but it was hard to tell.
so i took out the second wiper, and managed to attach it fine, if a bit slowly. i went back to halfords hoping for an exchange since the clip in the middle was broken. here's what it went mental.
lady at the cash register, who we'll call "mental of the day" or menday for short, told me to get another member of staff. i found one, lets call her jonny, who just went and asked someone else, who we'll call cool dude who i think knew everything about every car currently in existence and how to fix anything using all that they sell in the shop. or dude for short.
so jonny lady, after directing me to dude, who was busy, comes back with an entire replacement part. cool. menday, then wants to put it through the till, i assume for stock or something. she tells me off, saying they're only gonna do it once. i said, it's not my fault it was broken, and if this new one is broken i think you have to replace it too. she didn't reply because jonnylady then tells her to not put it through the till. that comment then set off mendal who went apeshit with jonny.
a one minute argument in front of me was followed by a one minute argument in an aisle far away but in my line of sight. she then comes back, takes my card, and then just runs off somewhere else in store. with my card. how very odd.
over 5 minutes later she comes back, and gives me my card back. i don't think she did anything on the till with it.
she also gives me a replacement clip. i say i don't need it, i already have a replacement blade. she doesn't get this after 5 times of me telling her and showing her that the blade i have is now fine so i just leave with my new blade and replacement clip.

this story has a happy ending* as i carefully remove the existing blade to see how to fit the second new one, which passes by without incident.

the end

as i went home with my extra clip, i realised that i would save it somewhere should i ever need it.

I will NEVER EVER need it.

i know however, that i will save it. and i realised i could probably throw away loads of stuff i 'might' need which is taking up lots of space. on the off chance i need something i've thrown away i could probably buy it off ebay for less than £20.
and that's when i realised there is an interesting relationship between hoarding things and money. hoarding things saves money, but is it worth it?


also, does anyone know what the point of collar straighteners are? (ie can i throw them and the spare ones away!?)


*i'm assuming she won't try to commit any fraud with my card having spent 5 minutes in the back of the shop cloning it.

human vs google

how do you know who to trust when faced with human info against results from google?

i guess you usually go for source, but what if both sources are reputable?

here is my dilemma. a welsh person told me some hilarious words in welsh however, google translate doesn't quite agree. but i think computer translators aren't yet up to scratch so i'm going with human winner in this battle. you'll be pleased about this because you'll now find out these two hilarious words in the welsh language. i will spell them phonetically, partly because i don't know how to spell in welsh.

1) jellyfish, in welsh, is called a:
piss god wibbly wobbly
(i think pysgod is correctly spelled welsh for fish, but i prefer my spelling)

2) microwave, in welsh, is called a:
poppity ping

anyway, that's enough learning for one day.

cheerio.

benjamin franklin

being not american, my first exposure to benjamin franklin was i think in day of the tentacle. (i just checked the internet to see if i could buy it for a couple of quid but it seems the going rate for the cd is about £20!)
anyway, as far as i was concerned, all he ever did was capture lightning. with a kite. so a doc brown style character. it turns out, however, that he did a lot more.
i been reading his autobiography (only the abridged one so far) and i think i am going to write down one thing each morning that i will do that day, and then do it. this will be in addition to my daily goals written here, which i have just updated.

i dont have much else to say. i seem to have accumulated a lot of useless stuff in recent years so am going to try to throw some of it away. i hope that in this process i may find a copy of day of the tentacle. that would be like finding money, only better, because it would be like finding money, going to the shop, buying something amazing, from the comfort of not moving.

going to do this while watching the cycling. some of the women look quite hot, but that may just be down to them wearing cool helmets. i don't want to google them in case i am disappointed.

amazing sportsmen

they always impress me. imagine how good you must be to win 6 consecutive gold medals in the olympics. apparently, only hungarian aladar gerevich has managed this.

another magnificent sportsman was eddie merckx. 5 tour de france wins and record holder of 36 stage wins, also the only person to have won the points jersey, king of the mountains jersey and overall winner in one year. he was a phenomenal athlete.

the people of britain seem to have a greater appreciation of cycling with bradley wiggins winning the tour de france, although i think mark cavendish will be more well known as time goes by for being possible the greatest ever sprinter.

it was a shame that he didn't get a chance to sprint for gold in the olympics road race although it does seem that no other country wanted to even try against him in a sprint finish so every someone in the breakaway won.

anyways, speaking of hungarians, george mikes said "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one".
which i think is a good thing!

my job

my job is uninteresting. my boss is interesting.

i've worked for horrible human beings in the past. ones who run in every morning shouting that you won't get paid if you don't do better. (As a form of motivation no less! after the 3rd time you start to ignore everything he says at it's easier that way). so you sit at work dreaming of having an awesome boss.
someone who has common sense. who uses his mind. who tells you things honestly. who tells you to go home at 430 because you aren't gonna be still concentrating at that time. who tells you to work from home when possible. and who encourages you every single step of the way. and that is my boss. a lovely human being and a great manager.

going to work in the past five weeks has not once been a chore. i don't seem to do that much after a hectic first week yet still somehow manage to get everything done on time.

the big problem with work is it takes away much of your day. i'm now having to be more efficient with the rest of my time so that i can actually write a sitcom (haven't done anything on this since i started work!), get better at programming (started doing something every day) and the many other things i want to do.
yesterday i filed a patent with a friend. it's an awesome idea, and he's a patent attorney so hopefully in 12 months that will come to fruition.
haven't had any time for poker sadly. at least now i have some money to deposit should i wish to start up again.
the last thing i have managed to do is start working out every day for the past few months. i managed to put on 3 kilos in a month and only about a kilo since. i have readjusted my rigorous (lol) training program to concentrate more on muscle groups with less time doing cardio (more high intensity cardio to be accurate, such as 10 minute sprint jogging [on a bike, obviously] instead of a 30 minute cycle).

hopefully the next 5 kilos will go on in the nearish future.

thats enough of an update for now. next time we shall discuss my horrible sleeping patterns of needing less sleep at night.

keeping up appearances

i remember learning to play chess
i had a tutor for a few weeks to learn some basics and some strategies. and then read a couple of books. i never learnt any openings or anything remotely advanced. when i was about 7 (?) i went to a club to play against others. i think everyone was beginners. or at least that's how i remember what it was supposed to be.

for my first game i sat down opposite a girl, younger than me and in a wheelchair. i kinda felt a bit sorry for her, and also confused as to whether she knew how to play chess.

4 moves later and i'd learnt a few things:
1) there's an opening called foolsmate where you win in 4 moves
2) when you lose to it you feel like a fool
3) to never, ever, judge someone by their appearance.
4) i was awful at chess

[edit: as you'll see from the comments, it's actually called a scholars mate, so rather than losing as a fool, i lost to a scholar. many thanks to mark for clearing that up]

reading riting and rithmatic

i think schools miss out on focus on talking. it sounds a stupid thing to say since most people talk too much; i just happen to think that most people talk much shit. especially me.

i want to learn to talk properly. and to think properly before i speak. this is what i'm going to focus on for the rest of the week.
thinking before i speak, thinking of the words i say, their consequences (if any! im not that important) and also how i speak and my posture while speaking. i will also make sure to not get angry (anger other than faux anger is never good).

the first thing, will be to remember to do this all day each and every day this week.

this is one reason i've begun to like writing more. there is more time to think before typing. and no one sees how long i've been thinking of the right words to say. and society seems to envy fast thinkers.

i had a funnier blog than this, but that will have to wait...

less blogging...

having a job is a pain. aside from waking up early, it means i have less time for all the good stuff. and there's not even much in the way of comedy for blogs.

i did just watch something on telly about a former world gurning champion, peter jackman. gurning is distorting your face to look mental. slightly offensive in my opinion. anyone who follows ricky gervais on twitter will be familiar with such images. this guy however, took it to another level. he got some teeth removed to be able to pull a better face. that's commitment.

his name was also something that struck me. it's an almost famous name. in my mind, a cross between peter jackson and hugh jackman. coincidentally, i just read about someone complaining on the bbc website about having an unfortunate surname. it was a journalist! that passes off as news? he didn't even have a bad surname. Gopnik. he thinks it's terrible because it means 'drunken lout' in russian. so a very small number of people he meets will laugh and remember him.

to me it just sounds like he's being a bit of a pansy. perhaps he should spare a thought for people called amanda. (and i hope he doesn't name his daughter amanda.) because in russian, manda means cunt.

recommendations

when you finish a job your employer writes you a reference. usually they try to tell the truth. i guess sometimes they don't for whatever reason, such as happiness to get rid of you.

i thought it would be quite good if you could do that for people too. eg

"completely disinterested in anything other than herself. only interested in winning, including every conversation. i didn't even realise that was possible.
looks down upon everyone even though she isn't tall (literally or metaphorically).
avoid."

"mental, but in a magnificent way. sometimes doesn't know whether to laugh or cry so does both at once. intelligent, quick thinker, generous and modest without realising it. tenacious and fun. and incredibly hot. treat badly and i will hunt you down like liam neeson from taken."