Astonishingly fluffy rabbits.

Link: 2003 All Breed Best In Show

(Not mine, obviously!)

A fascinating and moving weblog by an anonymous Iraqi woman. It’s worth reading right back to the first post. It’s a very personal, human view of Iraq, and the terrible problems there.

Link: Baghdad Burning

“Nearly a quarter of teenagers in the poll want to “work with computers”, and a third say it is for the excitement and the money.”

I think a golden rule of the IT industry is that if you’re in services or development, you want to avoid the “excitement”: steady green status displays, empty error logs, silent hardware alarms, aaah… that’s the way to be.

And as for the money, these kids are soooo last century.

Link: Want to be Bill or Gareth Gates?

I found this page earlier today while looking for pictures of tempeh (yes, I know) and it conveniently helped solve the mystery of the stuff left at the bottom of the pan when making soy milk, and the stuff floating at the top.

In Japanese the stuff at the bottom is called okara (doesn’t look good) and the skin at the top, when dried, is called yuba. Mmm.

Link: The Cook’s Thesaurus: Soy Products

This will come as a shock to people who know me, but I’m learning to speak Chinese. I didn’t really mean to - it all started from converstations while playing Go over lunch. Now I’ve been learning words for three weeks and just bought a pile of books, so I suppose I should accept that I’m at least making an effort.

I’m lucky to have a Chinese colleague willing to spend time listening to me mispronounce simple words and forget phrases I knew minutes before. I’m puzzling coworkers who overhear: “Sha” “No.” “Sha” “No. Sha.”“Sha” “No.” “Sha” “No. Sha.” “sha” “Yes!” “Sha” “No!” “Sha” “Nooo!” “Sha.” and so on every day. I’m not good at this type of thing.

I’m comfortable with English (once, long ago, I could actually write, sigh) but at school my lack of foreign language skills was legendary. I now know more Chinese than French, but to be honest that didn’t take more than about four hours. I was a spectacular failure in French classes. Even the worst pupils in my year probably had “At least little Timmy isn’t as bad at French as Peter Birkinshaw” on their reports, right next to the arson problem.

It was only towards the end of my GCSEs that I started to learn how to actually learn: before that I’d either absorbed information almost effortlessly, or watched it flow past me. It took some excellent sixth form teachers and a few library books on Buddhism to help me understand that learning is just a process: you apply effort, tools and techniques, and you learn. It was a bit late by then, but I’ve done OK. I still try to learn new skills: the whole content-to-tech career switch took a lot of O’Reilly books on the metro.

I don’t think I’ll ever speak good Mandarin Chinese, but I’m enjoying the attempt. I can use it as an excuse to watch more Kung Fu DVDs too.

Lots of instant messaging fun for Zaurus users. Not that you need much more than Jabber, or course. My Zaurus’s main battery seems to be getting rather weak recently, just as the Zaurus becomes much more fun.

Link: GAIM For Qtopia

Japan gets all the best toys personal productivity tools.

Link: Guest Review : Sharp Zaurus c760

A page with cardboard robot cases for A, who makes rather good cardboard art herself. Not quite on this scale, though…

What looks like a giant cardboard robot computer case.

Just turned 31, enjoyed a very long weekend of relaxing, chocolate, small robots and chocolate cake, and uploaded the first pile of dodgy code for Hippo to Sourceforge CVS. ETA for the prototype release: Christmas. All I need now are all the clever features, the usable user interface and bug fixes :-)

Where do I put my tea? What sort of desk has no tea-support feature? I’d need an extra desk to stand beside the iGo to hold various O’Reilly books, chocolate, tea, and bits of paper. That’s the trouble with minimalist furniture: it’s so minimal.

Link: iGo Desk Intro