The Lair

In no particular order - the events of the past week and a half or so -

Number of near death events: 4
I forgot that some roads are now one-way (a lifetime of habit on familiar streets) and ended up looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic.

Number of new bloggerati met: 2
Although one guy (you know who you are etc) was a brief meeting. The Fascist was, gratifyingly, almost exactly as I had imagined - although he sounded odd over the phone.

Random acts of desperation: 2
I still don’t have a DSL connection. A couple of days after I landed, I lugged my laptop over to a cafe (with hideously priced smoothies) just to enjoy the free wifi on offer. I felt simultaneously bad and good about the whole thing. Bad, because ye know - I didn’t really want to go to that place. Good because, well.. internet.

I also sent a plainitive SMS to tezcat asking for news of the internets. He rose to the occasion with a summary that would have done any summer-upper (sumerian?) proud.

Random three wheeler dudes talking to me about politics: 5
No really. I don’t care. Please stop. Why doesn’t my usual non-committal grunt work with you anymore?

Random three wheeler dudes talking to me about rising prices: umm. lost count
I’m still operating on UK prices and conversions. I laugh mockingly at your puny 2 quid fare. Well, no. The beer is annoyingly expensive. Maybe I’m just going to the wrong places.

New eateries scoped out: 4
The Sizzle was decent (their website still no worky, btw). Photos taken. Not sure if my whipping out a camera was the reason for being offered a questionnaire at the end of the meal or not. Maybe it was just a slow day, which is why the manager/owner chappie came over and asked us about the meal.

At the other end of the spectrum, also went (twice!) to a place near Nawala named “The Chinese Steam Boat”. Their gin is vile and filthy cheap. I highly recommend it. Decent food too, I guess.

Number of cumulative hours spent in a gaming cafe getting my ass kicked by screaming twelve year olds: umm… 15ish, I think
*mumble mumble* I was having a bad day or three, ok?

Number of paranoid bus conductors heard screaming at people to grab hold of their own bags: about 3
Yeah, bombs on buses, yadda yadda.

There’s more, but that’s probably for later.

It seems vaguely like something from a movie. Or failing which, at least a grander, larger scale version of a time capsule. Unfortunately, time capsules and archive footage usually serve to remind us of the awful hairstyles of the 80s and the cringeworthy aspects of our past. But this time, there’s pretty serious business afoot.

Way up in the arctic circle, there exists an island named Svalbard. (Yes, this Svalbard, as featured in the Pullman books). That’s the site of the “doomsday vault” (more properly, the Svabard Global Seed Vault). The wikipedia entry says that the vault was planned in 2005, I found a BBC link with some concept drawings.

The purpose of such a remote vault? No seedy business, I assure you (ok. C’mon. You had to know I was going there). The mission (via Wikipedia and also via an article in Nature)

… provide a safety net against accident loss of diversity in traditional genebanks. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it will certainly be more frequently accessed when genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts and natural disasters. Such events occur with some regularity. In recent years, some national genebanks have also been destroyed by war and civil strife. There are some 1400 crop diversity collections around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

The first set of seeds from Africa arrived yesterday. Go forth and … sprout?

And while this is an awesomely laudable cause, I do have this reminder from another field. There’s no point taking backups if you don’t test restoring the backup. How do these people know that the seeds are viable? (I mean, I’m sure there is some way - like taking temperatures from the germinating seeds or something). I haven’t found out how it happens yet, though.

I had an insightful, interesting (screw it, who am I kidding? it was painfully uncomfortable) conversation with a relation recently. Said relation has offspring of a certain age. I’ve written about the offspring before, specifically in the context of how they tend to like playing role playing games on the internet with total strangers (ancient history)

Anyway, said relation had been chatting over the watercooler with others and had (belatedly) come to the realization that the internet is, as they say, srs bzns. And now, having hunted down my email address with all the determination of a parent who figures that their precious snowdrop needs protecting, she wanted to know how she could “block all those nasty sites. You know, like porn and hacking sites and things like that“.

Pause. Deep breath. Roll eyes and refuse the chance to take a swipe at the hacking vs cracking debate, part eleventy billion. Tell her that this isn’t possible.

But you’re practically a [insert qualification here] in Computers. Surely you can do something?

No. I really can’t. *sigh* People need to stop watching stupid movies. Seriously.

And if anyone needs me for the rest of the week, well - I’ll be playing with KDE for Windows. As astonishing as it sounds, I like individual K-apps (Kopete, aKregator, Cervisia, Konqueror). I’m looking forward to this, broken though things probably will be on Windows.