Liadnan

Odd bit of spam today. Well, I thought it was spam and so did Gmail, but the curious thing was that it was well tailored: for a sort of Librarything/"books you might like" predictor coupled with amazon, sent to my livejournal email and not obfuscated in any way: the English was a little broken but not of the incoherent stream of drivel model. I dithered a bit before hitting delete (rather than unmarking as spam and then hitting delete - does that actually make a difference? I assume gmail's spamfilter learns, and if so that seemed almost... unfair. The really odd thing is that their "taster" book prediction was for something of which I actually am rather fond: Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Outfit called nearsky.com, if anyone's interested, which whois tells me is, um, owned by an outfit which itself has an .ru domain. Hmm.

I have been arsing around with setting up a local mail server recently, for no particularly good reason other than that I was bored and felt I wanted to understand this stuff a bit more. (a Getmail/Dovecot IMAP /Postfix setup if anyone cares). In the course of doing that and also trying to set up a vpn client to log into work's machines I somehow managed to completely screw up everything that had anything to do with the internet at all: this came as no surprise as I have no real clue what I am doing (it doesn't really matter as I want to do a complete reinstall soon and everything is backed up to the nines). Rather more surprisingly I managed to figure out how I had managed to completely cock it all up and undo it fairly quickly. This pleases me.

In other news, or rather, other rhetorical questions, why does chaos break out in Lebanon every time I am on the brink of buying a flight there?

From the ever-fertile brain of Nou, as a byproduct of something else: London Tube Line stations plotted against Google satellite maps.

That link shows the Piccadilly Line but the others can be found either by fairly obvious URL-munging or by selecting the line here, selecting the map option at the bottom of each page and then choosing map, satellite or hybrid as you wish. Or see all of them at once here.

In other news, I feel like shite.

The introductory paragraph above the fold seems to amount to little more than Women! Know Your Place.

What an offensive shit the man is. And this on the labour party website, as part of "Labour's 2006 World Cup Blog" (why, anyway?). "Views expressed in this blog and in the comments are the views of the individuals and are not those of the Labour Party. The Labour Party takes no responsibility for comments posted on this site." My arse. I'd like to see them try and escape liability via that disclaimer if he wrote something defamatory.

For the record, incidentally, I know nothing about football and care less, and no the World Cup isn't going to change that.

via Google Maps.

This story's been all over the place today: Google to digitise largish chunks of five major libraries, including a small but significant proportion of the Bodleian. And try as I may, my inner cynic is unable to repress my enthusiasm. Absolutely fantastic step forward.

Amusingly, but quite sensibly, next month should see the launch of the BL's archive of British websites. Round and round we go.

Professor Juan Cole has received a letter from Colonel Yigal Carmon, late of Israeli military intelligence, now an official at the Middle East Media Research Organization threatening him and the University of Michigan with a lawsuit over criticism of MEMRI made on Informed Comment and reprinted at anti-war.com.

His response seems to be "bring it on". Hurray for him.

I'm supposed to be researching something terribly abstruse, but instead I appear to have spent the last forty minutes reading McSweeney's Lists.

It's been a long week.

(And oh dear Christ, someone from B3TA interviewed the "Winner or Sinner" guy familiar to anyone who regularly goes past Oxford Circus.)

I appear to have big interweb at home. WATCH as my productivity descends to hitherto unimaginable levels.

Also, the sun is shining. Unfortunately I have a long and complicated job involving strict construction of a deed written by someone who had not the faintest whit of a clue how to do what they were trying to accomplish. Ho hum.

I'm fucking furious: I've lost my pencilcase. Which doesn't sound like much, but (a) I've had it for years, it was leather, and I'm fond of it; and (b) it contained an antique Parker Duofold I was given by my mother when I was 18, a yardoled silver propelling pencil I was given by my godmother when I was 21 (and have you any idea how much those things cost) and the tiny brass Athenian owl I've carried around as a mascot for more than 20 years.

I suspect it's a result of being extremely drunk in the Bierodrome last night and having a crap bag that things fall out of. But I've retraced most of my steps last night, so far as I remember them, and no one seems to have it in their lost property.

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Heigh ho. The vague muffled memories of last night are good ones. I have a suspicion I passed up an Opportunity because I thought they were too drunk to know what they wanted though. More fool me. Don't even have a phone number, though I think she has mine, for what that's worth.

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I'm keeping an eye on I am Belle De Jour, because some of the responses are quite funny and there seem to be more by the minute, though unsurprisingly a fair proportion are a bit unoriginal. Interestingly, more than one person has suggested that BdJ is actually Lisa Hilton, which wouldn't entirely shock me, having read some of her work. Frankie, red11: either of you remember her?

Meanwhile, yesterday's Private Eye had a piece "copyright all newspapers" on "Who Is BelledeJour (cont. p94)"

And also a long, and fascinating, report by Paul Foot on the lunacy that is the PFI. Loony even in the opinion of many of Thatcher and Major's minions, it would seem. But that has nothing to do with this.

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Off Away until next Tues.

(Edited to Add: Apparently, there is a god and I owe the charity of their choice thirty quid. Was in the Bierodrome after all, contents intact, just hadn't reached the lost property office.)