No geek
is an island

I’ve added a “Best of…” link to the left-hand sidebar. The new page is designed to group together some of the better posts from this blog to separate them out from all the random dross about what I had for dinner, etc.

(By the way, Delia and I made a smashing roast pork with apple and rosemary on Monday night. Really nice.)

So, yeah, if there were any posts you think are worth flagging, please let me know here or in the comments of the relevant post. Ta!

I just enjoyed listening to an Ocean Colour Scene song (it’s called Mechanical Wonder). Damn you, last.fm.

Twenty Hail Mary’s and no pudding for me tonight.

From today’s Guardian Corrections & Clarifications:

A caption with the page 13 photograph of Lucy Mangan, which accompanied the G2 feature, A month in Tescoland, October 7, stated in error that she had used concentrated fabric conditioner on her hair. She had used hair conditioner.

I always use 2-in-1 myself.

Fire hits Wallace and Gromit sets

Company spokesman: “Everything has gone, from as far back as Morph and all the way through to Chicken Run, including all the Wallace and Gromit films, Creature Comforts, it’s all there. Everyone is devastated.”

Nick Park said: “Even though its precious stuff and nostalgic - and its dreadful news for the company, in the light of other tragedies it’s not a big deal.”

Once again, it’s National Poetry Day. Seems only a year since the last one. Back then, I wrote a poem about a finger infection. This year, the illness theme continues.

Burns Nights

I happened to be complaining about TV characters whose names are contrived specifically to allow a pun for the show title. Thanks to various people for helping me compile this (in no way definitive) list of shows found guilty:

Any more examples are welcome.

Update: Let us take heed of, and never again forget, Land of Hope and Gloria.

Spent a lovely afternoon/evening in Glasgow on Saturday with various fellow Scottish bloggers (yes, I know I’m not Scottish; neither were most of they). Having stopped in at an easyInternertcafé on the way to do a spot of blogging (and to explain the use of word spacing and capitalisation), I arrived at a pub called Babbity Bowster around 3pm. If you like a pub filled with an ever-expanding group of folk musicians playing in the corner and regular interruptions for a cappella* songs - and the pub really was silenced - then this is the pub for you. If you do.

Despite occasionally being distracted out by fiddling (stop sniggering at the back), I had a great time drinking with these complete strangers. There was organiser Gordon (hurrah for Gordon); fellow geek Richard; Gunnella, who taught us Icelandic pronunciation; Chameleon, who taught me the useful German phrase for "My friend will pay" and who, it turned out, I’d seen on University Challenge but a few weeks earlier; Peter of Naked Blog fame, who offered me what purported to be a vitamin C tablet which I gratefully accepted despite having met him ten minutes earlier; Neil, of Neil Writes the World, and Corrinne of Little Blue Teacup. Judging from the match report, I missed Steve and Svetlana, who arrived shortly after I headed off for a Chinese.

Neil has written about Saturday in his Daily Record column. Now, who could have brought up the subject of Doctor Who?

[* spelling corrected via]

Kakuro is the most recent puzzle to be described by the cliché "the latest craze in Japan is now sweeping the UK." It has similarities with sudoku as far as numbers have to be slotted into rows and columns based on which numbers occupy other squares, but there is one significant difference: kakuro does involve some maths.

Take a look at kakuro.info’s daily puzzle to see what a whole puzzle looks like.

How it works

Given a grid, the aim is to ensure that every block adds up to the number at its beginning, using the digits 1-9 a maximum of once each. The numbers in the grid below indicate that the top row must add up to 4, the second row to 7, the first column must add up to 5, the second column to 3 and the third to 4.

The key with kakuro is to know some of the most common patterns of numbers that add up to certain targets. For example, 3, as in the second column of the grid, can only ever be the total of two digits: 1 and 2. Just knowing this tells us that the second column has a 1 and a 2, but we don’t yet know in which order.

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