Fly around a 3D Switzerland! It's very pretty and detailed - I've just spent ages looking for the Matterhorn, but I got there in the end. Requires lots of data download and a big ActiveX control. Now can they do one for Wales? (via /.)
posted by Jim Finnis 9/17/2001 02:45:52 PM ¶ Comment

Great games of our time - Tax Avoiders! Feel the thrill of filing an incorrect 1040! Run in fear from the IRS agent and the CPA! Grab that tax-sheltered investment on the bonus screen and return to put it in your portfolio! For heaven's sake, who could have thought this was a good idea?
posted by Jim Finnis 9/17/2001 02:44:14 PM ¶ Comment

From a first hand account by a Muslim chap who worked in WTC 7:

I was on my back, facing this massive cloud that was approaching, it must have been 600 feet off, everything was already dark. I normally wear a pendant around my neck, inscribed with an Arabic prayer for safety; similar to the cross. A hasidic Jewish man came up to me and held the pendant in his hand, and looked at it. He read the Arabic out loud for a second. What he said next, I will never forget. With a deep Brooklyn accent he said “Brother, if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us, grab my hand, lets get the hell out of here”. He helped me stand up, and we ran for what seemed like forever without looking back. He was the last person I would ever have thought, who would help me. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.

(via MeFi)
posted by Jim Finnis 9/14/2001 12:38:26 PM ¶ Comment

Given the week's events, the BBC are changing the programme of the Last Night of the Proms, replacing the traditional Pomp and Circumstance and Rule Britannia with such pieces as Barber's Adagio for Strings, and the Finale from Beethoven's 9th (the Ode to Joy setting). Whoa. This is completely unprecedented - the Last Night is one of England's great traditions, and the programme of the last half is normally sacrosanct.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/13/2001 11:06:27 AM ¶ Comment

After Brooke:

Armies are tools of violence;
They cause men to hate and fear.
The sage will not join them.
His purpose is creation;
Their purpose is destruction.

Weapons are tools of violence,
Not of the sage;
He uses them only when there is no choice,
And then calmly, and with tact,
For he finds no beauty in them.

Whoever finds beauty in weapons
Delights in the slaughter of men;
And who delights in slaughter
Cannot content himself with peace.

So slaughters must be mourned
And conquest celebrated with a funeral.

Dao De Jing, Ch 31, "Armies"

posted by Jim Finnis 9/12/2001 11:04:56 AM ¶ Comment

Meg's compiled a far better list of bloggers than I could have. Cheers, Meg. Read these blogs. As I just said on a mailing list, we're all reporters now.

Today should have been a good day for me - Paris-Dakar Rally entered the charts at number six. But frankly, that's just bollocks, isn't it? Perspective can be a terrifying thing.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 10:35:24 PM ¶ Comment

I have nothing to say in the face of this - trying to work this afternoon was almost impossible in the face of what's happened. I can't get my head around it, and I'm just a sodding Brit for fuck's sake. I'm worried about my friends in the States, I'm worried about my friends and loved ones in big cities here in the UK, even. Trying to get some kind of handle on it, on what people are thinking... Fark's been good for this, they say what they mean over there. MeFi too. Ev at Blogger has set up a special search page. New Yorker blogs: Anil. Catherine. Jade. Allen. Dori. Choire. Just some random people.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 08:54:17 PM ¶ Comment

An amazing thing. There's no news to speak of available from the normal sites, but Metafilter and even Fark are coming into their own.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 04:44:07 PM ¶ Comment

Arafat looks quite genuinely shocked.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 03:57:51 PM ¶ Comment

I feel sick.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 03:14:45 PM ¶ Comment

The BBC are just showing pictures ... oh my, there's another building on fire in Washington. Whitehouse evacuated? My god. Pentagon bombed? Watching the news unfolding on the BBC and on Metafilter.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 02:48:51 PM ¶ Comment

Bloody hell. Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, as I'm sure you all know by now. Horrible. I'm watching TV at the moment, but it's just unbelievable. Literally - I'm half expecting International Rescue to turn up. I can't help but think this is going to change things, but I can't even think about it yet.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 02:31:50 PM ¶ Comment

One of those tests that lets you figure out your Dungeons and Dragons character alignment. I'm apparently True Neutral with Good tendencies. That's nice.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/11/2001 11:11:09 AM ¶ Comment

Stanley Unwin, master of nonsense! This man is to radio was Joyce was to writing.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 05:43:02 PM ¶ Comment

The newly-married (eek!) Jet Wolf is back, and it looks like the wonderful "Operators Standing By" may return. Oh goodie. Although I'm sure Jet and Mike would rather not be dealing with idiots, we sure enjoy reading about it...
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 04:02:54 PM ¶ Comment

D'oh! I've often found that things work better when you read the instructions. I apologise to the manufacturer of the card mentioned two posts ago - it was My Own Damn Fault. I feel like such a fool. Any of you guys ever done this?
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 03:48:37 PM ¶ Comment

Dammit. I opened Blogger to write something, but my brain has now gone completely blank. Don't you just hate it when that happens? I think it must be a sign of old age.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 02:42:57 PM ¶ Comment

Agh! Trying to write environmental audio stuff (that's like reverb and things) for bloody pre-release versions of sound cards with bloody diabolical bloody drivers! Nothing I do works, but all in different ways. Truly a loathsome state of affairs.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 12:54:42 PM ¶ Comment

Love this. Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who hasn't been seen in nine years, may be playing Grandmasters anonymously on an Internet chess site. Quoth Nigel Short:

My unseen opponent began with some highly irregular, if not totally absurd, opening moves - shifting all his pawns forward by one square. These were moves that no Grandmaster would ever play."
Short said he immediately suspected a hoax, but became aware there was method in the apparent madness.
"From this deliberately unpromising position emerged moves of extraordinary power," he said. "In this first game I was totally crushed."

In other words, he was taking the piss. Excellent. Reminds me of a Phil Dick novel, in some ways.

Hm.. I've just read his bio, and this is strange - how does someone who hasn't been seen for nine years travel to Argentina in 1996 to promote random chess?
posted by Jim Finnis 9/10/2001 11:38:51 AM ¶ Comment

Hm... does the reblogger stuff work, I wonder? Right, it might do now...
posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 05:38:13 PM ¶ Comment

Blimey, I could never be a pathologist. I could never get used to being up to my arms in someone. Brooke's written a piece that describes what it's like, but it's most definitely not for the faint-hearted. Especially the bit about the bin liner. And the bit about the whores.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 04:18:08 PM ¶ Comment

Damn, 1 million children can't make an earthquake. There goes my next scheme for holding the UN to ransom.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 02:41:59 PM ¶ Comment

There's an article at Ananova about how children labelled as "gifted" often end up as sad old loners in dead-end jobs. Hm. I was tagged with this label, simply because I have - or, rather, had - a damn good memory for pointless trivia - and have experienced some of this stuff myself. Anyone else?
posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 02:41:04 PM ¶ Comment

Build your own siege engine! These guys did... (via /.) Then there's build your own H-bomb (accurate, but very silly - keep your HF in a plastic milk container, indeed).
posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 12:07:35 PM ¶ Comment

posted by Jim Finnis 9/7/2001 11:20:56 AM ¶ Comment

Me neither. Every word is an unnecessary stain on the silence. Beckett blogging anyone?
posted by Jim Finnis 9/6/2001 03:32:24 PM ¶ Comment

Just came back from the pictures after seeing Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes... bloody awful, with a dreadful ending - both a deus ex machina ... well, simia ex machina and a complete non-sequitur masquerading as a shock, telegraphed a mile off. Oh well. At least Helena Bonham Carter was watchable. In fact, most of the apes were - the humans were diabolical. Call me weird, but I have to agree with Jonathan Ross - she's one sexy little monkey.

But on the upside, we got to see the Mini advert again and successfully verified the voice as that of the inimitable Bill Bailey. Score!
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 10:49:43 PM ¶ Comment

A long interview with Joss "Buffy" Whedon, burbling about stuff... about Buffy (of course), about how Donald Sutherland is "a prick", and about how his script for Alien: Resurrection was massacred.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 03:59:48 PM ¶ Comment

I can't get away from music today, probably because I'm trying to write the damn stuff for the first time in ages. And properly write it - not sitting down at a computer and diddling, or even sitting at a keyboard or guitar and diddling, but sitting down with a pencil and a book of manuscript paper and writing down the noises in my head. It'll probably come to nothing, but it's still so much fun to do. Anyway, here's a page by composer Kyle Gann on the history of the modern equal-tempered tuning. He doesn't like it much.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 01:53:19 PM ¶ Comment

If m'colleague doesn't stop singing Blue Moon under his breath, I'll be forced to do something violent.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 12:17:24 PM ¶ Comment

Still on a weird musical jag, there's an online resource listing all 1490 possible scales within the Western 12-tone system. Some of them are very odd indeed. I'm quite fond of what he calls the epathimic mode, which has 6 notes.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 12:10:35 PM ¶ Comment

Whahey! Someone's performing John Cage's "As slow as possible" as slow as possible! It's going to take a couple of years before the first note gets played, and then a few more years before notes two and three. It should be finished in 639 years. Check out the German site - there are some PDF's there with English summaries, including notes about the special Organ, which should keep playing for 639 years with relatively little trouble.

It relates really nicely with the Long Now projects - the 10,000 Year Clock and the 10,000 Year Library.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 11:44:05 AM ¶ Comment

Uergh... DirectSound, c'est un bastard. Sigh. Well, actually, it's quite nice when it works but when it doesn't...
posted by Jim Finnis 9/5/2001 11:33:05 AM ¶ Comment

Shauna's business card arrived today! I feel part of a bigger world.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/3/2001 05:15:30 PM ¶ Comment

Weird. I was just talking to a lawyer friend of mine, and mentioned I was from Gillingham. She immediately piped up - "ah, famous trust case - the Gillingham Bus Disaster fund." I had no idea what this was about, so she explained that in the 1950's, a bus had ploughed into a marching column of young cadets, killing 24. A fund was set up to pay for funeral costs and help for the wounded. The whole thing became a legal minefield when there was lots of money left over - but it couldn't be distributed for charitable purposes on a technicality, and so had to be returned to the donors. Except, of course, that no-one knew who the donors were because most of the money was collected on the street - as far as anyone knows, the money is still sitting in an office somewhere in something called a "resulting trust". Anyway, I had a look for this on the old Interwebnet, and there's lots and lots of stuff about the legal wrangling that this has caused, but nothing about the actual disaster itself and the people who died... it's as if all that's remembered of this tragedy is a few dry legal papers and some money no-one can use. Hm.

Oh, I've just been told that the money was freed up in 1993, and a memorial finally built. I've never heard anything about it...
posted by Jim Finnis 9/3/2001 05:14:15 PM ¶ Comment

Happy Labor Day (ugh... that looks horrible. "Labour Day". That's better) you guys in the States, whatever Labor Day is.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/3/2001 02:37:52 PM ¶ Comment

5-1? Strewth. How'd that happen? And on the same day that Brian Moore (of "head looks uncannily like London Planetarium" fame) passed away, and sadly before the game. There goes another figure from my childhood - he was a local, from Gillingham, and I remember him from my telly-watching youth...
posted by Jim Finnis 9/2/2001 09:25:47 PM ¶ Comment

Pah. I hate having to get up in the mornings. I had to make sure I was awake for the guy who was coming to take my ITV Digital box away - the village where I now live has no reception, which is bloody annoying, cos terrestrial TV is largely tripe. Oh well. The upside was that a couple of CD's I'd ordered dropped onto my doormat - John Adams' Harmonium and Nixon in China. Awesome stuff, uplifting, constantly moving, complex minimalism. Yep, I know that's nearly an oxymoron but if you've heard his stuff you'll know what I mean. I heard Harmonium in one of the BBC's Proms broadcasts about a month ago and it blew me away. And Nixon in China is just gobsmacking - I'd love to see it one day.
posted by Jim Finnis 9/1/2001 01:32:41 PM ¶ Comment

A couple of Kevin Smith things - first, an interview with the man talking mainly about Jason Mewes:

"Here's a guy who could be as big as Affleck or [Matt] Damon, but he just can't get it together. When he isn't making a movie, you can usually find him on my couch or imbibing somewhere.
"Knowing Jason for 12 years was the best training for fatherhood I could ever get. There's nothing [his 2-year-old daughter] Harley could do that would surprise me as much as that kid has surprised me.
"For a while, he was working at my comic book store [Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, in Red Bank], but he was supposed to open up at 11 and wasn't showing up until 1 o'clock.
"So I had to fire him from the store that bears his name. I mean, he's irresponsible to an unbelievable degree."

Maaaaaaaaaan... then this sweet and funny comic Smith wrote telling the story of how he met his wife. Awwwwww.... (links via linkmachinego and robyn)
posted by Jim Finnis 8/31/2001 11:57:55 AM ¶ Comment

By the way, Cheese Before Bedtime is a great name for a band. Of course, my favourite band name of all time is Kitchens of Distinction.
posted by Jim Finnis 8/31/2001 11:21:47 AM ¶ Comment

I dreamt last night that I was being eaten by a giant brain. This in spite of my ability to hide by merging with other objects. I hid inside a tree, but the giant brain just ate me and the tree together. It was OK, though - the brain had some kind of extradimensional portal inside it as part of its digestive system and I escaped that way. Actually, the digestion scene had some really nifty coloured pencil animation, rather like Bill Plympton.

I really must lay off the cheese before bedtime.
posted by Jim Finnis 8/31/2001 09:56:11 AM ¶ Comment

Nukes. How to make nukes. Pretty pictures of nukes. Eek.
posted by Jim Finnis 8/30/2001 03:54:09 PM ¶ Comment

No, it's OK, Ian says he's using his new headjammer. That's why I'm having such trouble stringing together coherent thoughts today. What I need is a tin foil hat.
posted by Jim Finnis 8/30/2001 03:26:25 PM ¶ Comment

Damn, I'm under mental control by Zorg from the planet Quargnhargle again. Any thoughts?
posted by Jim Finnis 8/30/2001 03:14:48 PM ¶ Comment

Now, I dislike Neil and Christine Hamilton as much as the next man, but isn't the cynical use of the eeeevil underlit shot currently on Ananova a bit... much?
posted by Jim Finnis 8/30/2001 11:20:39 AM ¶ Comment