No geek
is an island

Word of the day: ephebiphobia - the fear of teenagers. Believed to be treatable by (spot the oxymoron) liberal use of ASBOs. (Via.)

I’ve been getting a few hits for people apparently wanting to print out the SoDooku. Always happy to oblige, I’ve made a printable version available at here.

On March 26th, I watched the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who on a big screen in London. Shortly before it began, we saw on the news that former PM Lord Callaghan had died.

Last night, BBC3 began repeating the series. Shortly afterwards, the news was reporting the death of former PM Sir Edward Heath.

No further comment in necessary, although I’m still very much looking forward to the Christmas special.

(Shamelessly cribbed from some smart non-bloggers who pick up on this sort of thing.)

Lothian Buses - or, rather, their drivers - are on strike next Monday as part of ongoing industrial action. There is no service on strike days and a Saturday service the rest of the week. Given that I use these buses to get to work, this is Bad News.

As I have a bus pass, I thought I’d email and ask how I would be compensated. Good News: they got back to me very quickly and told me they would be making amends:

Option 1
After the strike is over and normal service has been resumed, holders of
Adult and Junior Advance Purchase Ridacards can opt to have two days
additional travel added to their GoSmart card for every day when Lothian
drivers are on strike.

Option 2
As an alternative, and again after the strike is over and normal service has
been resumed, a monetary refund in respect of each day lost through strike
will be paid at the following rates

Adult £1.55 per day
Student £1.30 per day
Junior £1.05 per day
[...]
For those customers who pay for their Ridacard by Direct Debit, a single
reduced payment will be taken in accordance with the above scale of
compensation in the first or second month following the end of the strike,
after which the monthly payment will revert to the normal amount.

I think I’ll catch a train next Monday (an hourly service for a train journey lasting less than five minutes) and walk the rest of the way. The Saturday service may actually suit me better: fewer buses but at more convenient times.

We’ve got a system upgrade in process at work so most of this week I’ve been at a different campus, passing the downtime by reclassifying pamphlets with National Library of Medicine shelfmarks to the Dewey Decimal System.

In my lunch hour yesterday, I went for a walk up the road and stumbled upon a gate marked Fettes College - alma mater of the PM. I couldn’t see much of the college itself but today I walked a different way and found myself looking down a long drive at the school’s imposing main building.

As of Monday, I’ll be back in my usual office but seconded for several weeks to the Systems team, so my work will change from standing orders, cataloguing, classifying, invoice processing, etc., to techy stuff with the library management system, which will be very interesting.

Because Technorati indexes my categories as tags, I’ve renamed them to more standard terms - less interesting, but more useful taxonomically.

BBC: Lib Dems win Cheadle by-election - Mark Hunter won the Cheadle by-election for the LibDems with a 3,657 majority. Former Tory MP Stephen Day lost - again. Labour lost their deposit.

Bus firm takes French car sharers to court.
(Via.)

Things have been getting a bit serious on the blog lately, so here’s something ridiculously geeky - in the “You wasted your lunch hour on that?” sense - to lighten the mood.

Just to show that sudokus don’t have to use numbers - any set of discrete symbols will suffice - Christopher Lee stars in a puzzle far, far away… it’s SoDooku!

Pix via Google Image Search; puzzle from Sudoku Generator - rather than the traditional method preferred by The Guardian, where, beginning at sunset, an elderly Japanese man calls out numbers at random while being beaten with a broom of bamboo, this continuing until a puzzle with only one solution has been formed which is then etched into a marble tablet, sanctified in holy water and flown to Farringdon. That sounded like too much effort.

Conspiracy nuts will be overjoyed: London Underground Bombing ‘Exercises’ Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack. (Via.)

“I will ‘blog for victory’ on the 10th of August by writing a post about the need for House of Lords reform, and link to the Elect the Lords campaign website but only if 20 other bloggers will too.”

Yesterday, for the first time in months, I completed the daily Guardian cryptic crossword - all on my own, without a dictionary or Google, and before I’d even reached the station for the train journey home. I was suitably flushed. Even better, it was set by the crème de la crème of setters, Araucaria, and featured a signature Very Long Answer. This anagram - 8 words comprising 33 letters - once solved provided a useful hoard of checked letters, which enabled me to solve my favourite clue from the puzzle:

Mary’s third keeps dog in order — good news about her and another James? (4,5,4)

(Answer…)