nothing new under the sun

Noting the awkwardness of fiddling with the speed control on a treadmill to adapt to my pace, I pondered how you could modify the treadmill itself to adapt its speed automatically. I came up with an idea not unlike this one - filed in 1992, patent granted in 1994 - although rather than ultrasonic rangefinding my idea was to use pressure on the treadmill loop itself to determine the runner's location. Oh well. I guess I'll have to come up with something else for my Get-Rich-Quick scheme.

character flaws

In the past week or so, it has been independantly noted that I am very bitter and I am cynical beyond repair. Sorry if you were on the receiving end of that. Also, sorry if you encountered Cranky Waider this week, as he was in pretty full effect due to some technical stuff that was going the wrong way down a one-way street, and doing so while honking its horn at people coming the other way trying to point out the error.

Having gotten that out of the way, I will note the following (we'll call it "residual crankiness")

• My Amazon Wishlist is now titled "Yes, it's up-to-date". Even though there is stuff on it from 2004 that's no longer available from Amazon themselves, and there's other stuff there that Amazon UK simply won't ship to me due to an ongoing issue with recycling laws in Ireland.
• Twitter comes with a feed. So does your blog. If I'm interested in the latter, you really shouldn't need to tell me about it on the former. Announce your blog, sure. Tell me every time you post? Not so much.
• Daylight savings time can bite me. Twice. And the alleged US energy-saving legislation from 2005 that made things even more screwy can seriously bite me.
• Livejournal posts of your twitter posts: same deal as going the other way. If I'm interested, I'll have subscribed to both. If I'm not interested, I'm not frickin' interested, ok?
• This weather has got to stop. I got snowed on last weekend. I came home yesterday with hands so cold I could barely type. And now it's blazing sunshine, after blowing a storm this morning. Maybe humans were meant to sleep through this.
• Dear local bar, please clean the taps or something. Three beers giving me a headache? That's not right.

In the immortal words of the TBSC:

Whew, that was fun. Actually, it has nothing to do with any of that. I'm just killing time until this Pat tape runs out.

proposed word

This is probably just bait for ronebofh, but anyway: votagulary, n.: the collection of words you inevitably end up confining yourself to after going a bit mad with this whole Web 2.0 tagging lark.

updated to fix the spelling of my new word to that which I had intended it to be. how embarrassing.

also updated to fix other spelling. oh the humanity.

domestic FAIL

I cut myself today.

While dusting.

*SHAME*

this is the sort of thing I'm unrepairably cynical about

According to John Gormley, our Minister for the Environment (who is, incidentally, a member of the Green party), "We can demonstrate through Earth Hour that individual action can make a difference on climate change"

Really? How do we demonstrate that switching off non-essential lights on many public buildings (my italics) makes a difference on climate change? How much energy was used in promoting this, as a fraction of the saved energy? Is someone going to measure this scientifically, or are we just going to collectively pat ourselves on the back for doing "something" for 1/8766 of the year while continuing to waste energy as usual for the remainder?