I'm studying. Don't expect any entries for the next few weeks except this one, which, despite the previous entry, is an extended entry:
A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist, and ordered them to find a way to guarantee that his horse would win in the next week's races. The day before the race, they reconvened.
Gangster: Engineer, what have you got?
Engineer: I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide electrical shock to the horse.
Gangster: That's very good! But let's hear from the chemist.
Chemist: I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that disolves into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore cannot be detected in post-race tests.
Gangster: Excellent, excellent! Physicist?
Physicist: Well, let us consider a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion...
[off-topic: I'm not going to do the extended entry rubbish now. The entire entries from now on will be all on the index page. ~huwr]
I've been getting into it! I've so far tried quite a few black teas. Lady Grey, English Breakfast, and some weird Indian ones which were of a poo brand that kind of sucked.
I've enjoyed Lady Grey the most, but I am terribly excited about being able to try an Earl Grey soon. Specifically, it'll be Twining's Earl Grey (they were the ones who invented it, so I figure they'll be the best at making it).
Nevertheless, I have had a serious problem. I don't have a mug. Every tea drinker needs to have a favourite mug. I've been doing some research as to the kind of mug I want and here is what I have come up with:
0 - It has to be geeky, but it can't be too obviously geeky. Geeky means that it has to have some obscure humour or in-joke that only geeks get. A good test would be to imagine Joe Average considering the mug. If he gets it without explanation or too much thought, it's not obscure enough. It has to say "Huw". This means that gaming references are right out. Obviously, plain company logos are also right out, unless the company did something really cool, but not many people know about it. That means that the Apple logo is right out, but the BeOS logo is in. Both companies did/do cool stuff, but Joe Average doesn't know what BeOS is (look it up, Joe!). This means that a Tux mug is also out, but not a FreeBSD mug.
1 - It has to have a white interior. There is nothing worse than not being able to see what you are drinking. I love looking at the brown-coloured stuff and swirling around the funny leaves at the bottom.
2 - It has to be big. I'm not talking bloody huge, but big enough to be "Huw"-ge (Ho Ho Ho).
So far I have only come up with a few appropriate candidates:
0 - The Wikipedia Mug. It's advantages are being quite geeky, but not obvious. It is large and also white.
1 - A mug from UserFriedly.org. I so far haven't been able to find one, but I guarantee that something from here would be teh cool.
2 - I'm not sure, but I think maybe this O'Reilly Mug. It might be too small.
3 - This fully sick Debian mug. It has it all. Geekyness, Obscurity, Largeness, comes with a free dead Indian (although they don't print that on the website, it's bad for business).
4 - This one wreaks of awesomeness. I love this one.
5 - The final one. Almost the best. Tea tastes twice as good when you are drinking it out of a reference mug.
Now, all I need now is the mug. It's a bit of a shame. I don't have the capacity to get any of these (feel free to take pity on me and buy me one, though). Anyway, it'll be a while until I get a mug, but it'll be so cool when I get one. A mug reflects upon your personality. It becomes an expression of self. Like a Jedi's lightsaber...
For some reason, can't think why, people have started to call me "shaggy" at school...
They must be mad.
One day a man was looking for a new pet, so he went to the pet store and asked the owner if he had a dog. The owner showed him a few dogs, but the man wasn't interested. Suddenly the pet store owner had a thought.
"I know just the dog for you," he said, and went to the last kennel in the row. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"Why yes, that is the shaggiest dog I ever saw!" said the man. "I should take it to show my wife!" he went on, "I'll buy him."
The man bought the dog and took it home to his wife.
"I bought a dog today," he said. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"Why yes, that is the shaggiest dog I ever saw!" said his wife. "You should take it to show the minister!"
"You're right," said the man, and he took the dog to see the minister.
"I bought a dog today," he said. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"Why yes, that is the shaggiest dog I ever saw!" said the minister. "You should take it to show the mayor!"
"You're right," said the man, and he took the dog to see the mayor.
"I bought a dog today," he said. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"Why yes, that is the shaggiest dog I ever saw!" said the mayor. "You should take it to show the governor-general!"
"You're right," said the man, and he took the dog to see the governor-general.
"I bought a dog today," he said. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"Why yes, that is the shaggiest dog I ever saw!" said the governor-general. "You should take it to show the Queen!"
"You're right," said the man, and he took the dog to see the Queen.
"I bought a dog today," he said. "Isn't that the shaggiest dog you ever saw?" he asked.
"No," said the Queen.
This isn't much of an entry, more of a soft blurting.
First let's get one thing straight. There is a difference between smilies and emoticons, at least for my purposes. Smilies are made of little conjoining ascii glyphs, such as colon + close-bracket for ' :) '. Emoticons are those little animated images that you get in IM programs such as MSN, AIM and iChat.
Emoticons seemed to me to be little images that went along with the ascii glyphs. Such as replacing the colon + close-bracket with a little smiley face. As more and more sad gits created more and more smilies, such as eight + caret + capital d for ' 8^D ', more bloody emoticons were created as well.
Time was that emoticons were just images that replaced smilies. Annoying though they were, most clients allowed you to turn their display off, and all was good.
However, someone somewhere had a brain wave to create emoticons for things that didn't have easy ascii representations. Suddenly, people are sending roses to each other, or mugs of beer. This is not so good for you if you have emoticon display turned off, because you are all of a sudden receiving random glyphs that people expect you to understand. Things like (#), which in its ascii form looks like a dog's arse, but can actually represent a mug of beer (I don't actually know what the various protocols interpret this as).
Time was that people didn't need to send each other images of roses and images of mugs of beer to have a conversation on the internet. There is nothing wrong with the four simple smilies: happy :), sad :(, tongue-poking :p and winking ;)
This brings me to another point of annoyance: emoticons used in emails. For some reason, people use emoticons in emails. These just look unprofessional and altogether dirty. For a start, they make you look like some 14 year old girl who spends her time on the 'interweb' talking to her friends about their boyfriends. Secondly, it increases the size of your message (as if sending a formatted message didn't do that already).
Luckily, all good email programs allow you to turn off formatted text and subsequently images. It still looks ugly to see those blasted "image could not be found" logos all over the place.
Who knows, next week I may go on about email forwards.
This is an essay I wrote for school, but never quite finished. It wasn't supposed to be handed in, but it was to just get us thinking. I thought I should put it up here.
Does your nation owe you or do you owe your nation?
---
Huw Rowlands
The issue is complicated, and can probably be expanded into a larger question. The question would be easier to tackle if it were ``Does your nation owe you or do you owe your world?'', in which case the answer would be yes to both.
The thought of a citizen owing their nation something would naturally come from them believing that their nation has given them something that they need to repay. For instance, traditionally, soldiers going overseas to fight a war would usually be told that they were doing it to defend themselves from some evil threat (communists, terrorists, et cetera). These soldiers would then go overseas and fight, possibly for the improvement of their nation, but in doing so create a war, to the detriment of the world. This behaviour is related to patriotism (_patria_, the land of one's fathers), which has been the selling point of many wars. ``Patriotism is the large refuge of the scoundrel'', attributed to Samuel Johnson by Boswell. Johnson is outlining how leaders often use the excuse of doing something good for your country as a means of inspiring people to follow them, like to war.
However, the thought that of a person owing their world, while being harder to inspire in people, is probably far more productive. If someone is inspired to give things back to the world, then they would do what they could to make the world a better and more productive place. These people would be like contributors to a charity. Clearly, not everyone can contribute by feeding under-developed nations, and those people should not have a negative impact. Other contributors could make up for this. This is all assuming that there isn't someone deliberately undoing the contributors' work (effectively performing social vandalism).
This leaves only one more point of discussion, the matter of your nation owing you. Firstly, a nation can never quite 'owe' you anything without you giving it anything in the first place. However, a nation does have a certain responsibility to its citizens. For instance, a nation that gave its citizens all an equal chance at education could have a greater opportunity to produce a genius. This genius could then go on to perform a major contribution to the world.
#conclusion#
This is the first entry in my blog. I plan to use it to explain just what the purpose of this blog is and what the purpose isn't.
Firstly, the purpose of the blog is not to be a diary. Too many blogs are sitting around the web going on about "today I saw my boyfriend, et cetera". This is _not_ one of those blogs. No one cares about my day (or your day, for that matter).
What this blog is going to be is more of a sort of journal. Less of the opinion "today I did this..." rubbish, and more of the interesting discussions of whatever I can think of.
Please feel free to comment on what you should think this blog should be: