Aquarionics

Beware low-flying fat babies

Happy Valentines day, world. I hope your day is happy and smily and pink an' fluffy and gooey and nice and great!!!!

Isn't it nice to have such a kewt fwuffy colourscheme on this fluffy-wuffie day? Awwwww, Isn't it cute? Look! Pinkness!!

and not tacky at all, obviously.

Attachments

• The Valentines Day Redesign

Redness

Happy Red Nose Day world :-)

Want to support RND cheaply? Mike@Troubled Diva is attempting to get 235 comments by Friday midnight whereupon he will donate £100 to Comic Relief. So go make comments

(Note: Comments were down around three-ish yesterday. They should be back up now)

Attachments

• New design for Red Nose Day, Screenshot

Defined No Subject

Due to a cascade of errors that would put the average farce to shame, all mail sent to anything@aquarionics.com has been failing to get though. The instructions to send anything important to aquarion@suespammers.org instead still stand. Lonecat’s diary redirection page will also be up shortly. Arn’t server moves fun?

This weekend we went up to see Supermouse & Pol for Red Nose Day where the entire living room was decorated with round, red fruit and sweets, and things in red pots, and Cherryade, Apple & Blackcurrent squash & Tizer. Generally a red theme to the festivities. It has been brought to my attention that various people from overseas will have little to no idea of this Red Nose Day thing, so I shall endevor to explain.

Comic Relief is a charity set up to do good things by silly means. That is, it raises money by things like Red Nose Day – which I’ll explain in a sec – and plows it back into things like building wells in Africa, or homeless shelters in the UK, or promoting understanding of Alzheimer’s, or helping people move out of slums in both places. It operates things both in the UK and Africa. Every two years since 1999 1989 (with the first in -98- +88+, they tried annually, but biannually works better) they hold “Red Nose Day”, which is basically a whole night of fundraising television being led up to by two months of prodding people to be sponsered to do silly things like bathe in custard, jump off towers (With bungee ropes), etc. Also, large companies do special things (Cake companies make special “Red Nose” cakes with 50p of the sale of each going to Comic Relief), and they sell Red Noses of a special design (This year they had hair, previous years have been squeaky, had arms, been tomatoes, turned yellow in heat, been furry, etc etc) all in the name of Cha-re-deee.

This year they had a fantastic parody of Harry Potter (On the trip up, Pol had mentioned that when film companies couldn’t get Alan Rickman they went for Jeremy Irons, so when the parody turned up with Snape being played by Irons, we all creased up laughing), another of Blankety Blank, and Reeves and Mortimer being desperatly, Desperatly unfunny. They raised over 35,000,000 for charity in that one night, which is a fuck of a lot, and they usually double the night’s total with the results of the sponsored stuff that goes on on the day itself, which will be a fuck of a fuck of a lot.

Then we slept, then we woke, then I helped with gardening, watched more TV, ate Pizza, watched Jonathan Creek, Slept, Did fencing (Of the “Help Pol with wooden boards” kind, rather than the “Hit people with swords” kind), where I found a fence-post with a core of solid diamond and demonstrated my inability to hit nails in with the aid of a hammer due to disposition to finding diamond-core of item I am hammering nails into. Then had pancakes, then went home.

A delightful and relaxing weekend, leading upto next week, wherein if we don’t find somewhere new to live we shall be more fucked than a very fucked thing.

Fuck.

Blast, I appear to have broken my giving up swearing for lent. Oh fuck it.

Snew

There are many things you might expect when you wake up on a spring morning.

Today, I was going to go out and get LC’s birthday presant.

Now, It’s snowing.

SNOWING

In mid-april.

Can’t get a white Christmas this year? How about a nice white April?

The world is conspiring against me. I’m going back to bed.

Attachments

• Damn Snow

Homework

So, due to the office being me and the CEO for most of this week, I’m likely to be working from home most of this week. This, from a CCDE POV is a RGT. Problem is, I’ve never been that good at Homework. Getting better, though.

So, the Blogmeet happened (as DVD, Cathy & Kevin have all talked about), then we went to the ccooke-jar where we slept, and then there was a AFP Meet next day, photos are around (for the AFPMeet and the Blogmeet) and, this just in, for the NikkiMeet earlier this month.

Making a list, checking it twice

Since LoneCat and Adrian have both put up lists of “Stuff they are taking to CCDE” (CCDE being the event half the people I know are going to this weekend. We shall be in a field, camping) I decided to put my list up:

Aquarion’s List Of Stuff Wot He Should Take To CCDE:

• Clothes
• Sleeping Bag
• Money
• Aquarion

Of course, this is heavily biased to the fact that I’m going with LC, who – as you can see above – is quite prepared enough for the both of us.

Work is… interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been working alone all week (Either from home or in the office, where the CEO has been out in meetings or just out) and I’ve started the coding on The Project. This means that I’ve had to set some precidents about how we’re doing things (Mostly based on how I do things) which is slightly worrying, since I have a feeling I’m going to be recoding everything again. It’s also worrying that I’m the person opening up and locking up, since I’m sure I’m going to walk in one morning and discover I did something really stupid like leave the window open.

Life Goes On…

Here

Have just got back from CCDE.

Have had shower.

Am completly shattered.

Tomorrow, Sense may return.

CCDE 2003

I’ve spent the last few days in a field down in Woolpit, in Surrey. Singing, drinking, joking, entertaining, being entertained, joked at, drank at and sung at. It’s been wonderful, and I can’t wait until the con next year for more of similer.

It started on Friday, when I wandered out of work to go straight to the field and accidentally met LoneCat at the station. The plan was for me to go there by train, whilst LC took the train to Bedford, got the car from her parents, filled it with tent and camping stuff, and wandered down to Woolpit. Since we ran into each other by chance at Kings Cross, we both wandered to Bedford and down by car when we entered the field. When we got there we were hailed by a group of wandering minstrals (eric jarvis, Adrian Ogden & CraigD) who mentioned that the Jam session we’d all organised to happen was due to start at sevenish. At 7ish it started, at 11ish it ended. The description of the Jam I’ll leave to others, for my part I’ll say that I totally screwed up ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ by the simple method of drinking half a glass of Hamster’s home-brew before going on stage which sent my voice all over the shop. There was some fantastic singing, some not quite so fantastic singing, and some plans for the next one.

A note here on clothing. I have a tradition of wearing very loud clothes at CCDE. This year I kinda excelled myself, though it’s the last time I’ll be doing so to any degree more than normal. It was nice while it lasted, though :-)

Saturday dawned nice and bright and early, as it does when you are camping. And at some time similer to “dearOmIt’sEarly” I was standing around drinking tea and waiting for the van of breakfast to swing open it’s shutters. Eventually it did, and Satuday came – for me – as a day of sitting around in circles in the sunshine taking salt and speaking of affairs. In the evening there was the Maskerdade which was won by an unconsidered trifle, but should have been won by LoneCat and Añejo as Nac Mac Feegles. Later there was Martin being tied up whilst everyone else had a barbeque. Yay.

Sunday was the Day of Games. For most, it was also the Day Of Going Home, but there was still lots of Games as well. Since ppint and his clones were selling games, we combined the entire series of Munchkin card-sets into one huge “Ultra-Munchkin” set which snow won after about three hours of play, after which I was exceedingly sunburnt. Also happening was ccooke’s game of “”Frag””:http://www.sjgames.com/frag which is what happens if you turn Quake/Doom/Unreal into a board game. It’s fun, you should buy it.

Monday came, goodbyes were said, tents were struck and we left at 1-ish to go from Woolpit Bedford Kings Cross Paddington Reading. This took 9 hours.

Then we slept. We were very tired.

Photos will be coming soon, but I left my camera by Liz’s tent, and so won’t get mine until it gets back to me.

There is no such thing as too colourful

(Photos by Hamster and AdrianO, both taken at CCDE 2003 (Friday night and Sunday morning respectivly))

Heat

It’s hot. I know it’s hot because an amazing percentage of the weblogs I read have mentioned it
So it’s hot, and so I have this urge to lie in bed and do nothing.

Tried that. Bed’s too hot to.

We have a country-wide fan shortage, apparently. Or at least Reading-wide. Can’t get one for love nor money (I assume. I haven’t tried Love in exchange for air-con), but then in a wonderful brainwave, LoneCat remembered that the portable heater also blows cold air! Yay! Coolness. Though limited to keeping my ankles warm, which isn’t quite so wonderful. I’m not built for hot weather, I melt. Ah well, I have home-made Banoffee Pie, and home-made Banananana Loaf (We had excess of bananas).

It really is hot, though. The BBC announced a new record yesterday (First in Heathrow, which is not that far from here) and the Guardian managed to fry an egg on the pavement. Ick. Much much too hot.

11th Hour

Remembrance

I’m not religious.

This isn’t that I didn’t go to church regularly. I went. As a Scout, with church parade, to every Remembrance Day service, sat though the silence, wore the poppy.

A few years ago I was one of the people who did the Remembrance service. My friend Barry had been the one who plays the last post, and I was one of the people who did readings in assembly. I read two things, the first was Rupert Brooke’s classic piece of poetry, The Soldier (When I am gone, think only this of me // That there’s some corner of a foreign field // That is forever England.) and some statistics.

In World War one, over 8.5 million people died. 65 Million were mobilized for war. Britain alone lost 900,000 people, almost 36% of all those sent to the front. I was reciting a list of statistics like this to a hall of 250 people a time, twice a day for two days. I thought about this, and started actually doing the remembrance thing. It’s important.

A little while ago (1980) some tin-pot organisation decided to hijack remembrance day. They chose to do so by creating white poppies and selling them. The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, commented that she felt it in “Deep Distaste” which I agree with. Their proposition was that Remembrance day glorified war, and that we should stop remembering the dead and begin to save the living.

I find this attitude scary. One of the most dangerous things you can do is forget what you have learnt before. The tens of millions who have died in wars up until now did not deserve to die, and that they did should be noted and watched and learnt from, not drawn a line under and told “Right, seen that, now we try this”. You must face what has happened to resolve not to let it happen again. If at first you don’t succeed, understand why, and try something else.

This is generic, and I’m trying not to pull the current conflagration into this, but there is a very good example of it in the current conflict. In the US Military high command, there is a phrase called “The Dover Test” which refers to the public perception of coffins arriving at Dover, Delaware, the US Air Base which receives such things. For the past 40 odd years these ceremonies have been public, but recently (As in, shortly before the conflict began) the traditional televisation of these events were banned. The US public no longer sees every coffin come home, there is no Dover test. Mr Bush has yet to go to a single funeral resulting from this conflict, and I’m terrified that they’re just numbers.

When we forget the dead, we condemn the living. We should not forget those who died that we might live.

We will remember them.