By David
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December 28, 2006
When Blair was challenged about the faith school in the North-East of England, Emmanuel College, which happily supported fundamentalist evangelicals and young-earth creationists, he said that diversity was necessary in education. That’s such a dumbfounding response that it’s difficult to understand that Blair really did seem to be supporting the teaching of nonsense (that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old) as if stupidity and sense needed equal curriculum time.
By David
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December 28, 2006
I saw that Nick Robinson is leaving the BBC for ITV and told Helen, who said
He is a cheesy little shitster
She’s in a bad mood at the moment. I might ask her views on this news tomorrow to see if she sticks to the same line.
By David
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December 28, 2006
Ok, so I know I should update Ubuntu and I’ve read that Breezy isn’t the best for sound but I’ve finally - after an afternoon of messing about - managed to coax Audacity to use my Logitech USB microphone.
First of all, I downloaded the (beta) source for Audacity 1.3.2 and following the helpful advice on mics in Ubuntu here, compiled the source with:
./configure --with-portaudio=v19 --without-portmixer
By David
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December 25, 2006
For the first time since taking up Ubuntu, I’ve been lost in the content of work and forgot completely the OS I was using. I was on autopilot, on Linux ,and thought for a moment that I was Helen’s laptop rather than my own. She uses XP at home.
I haven’t been able to use Ubuntu as much as I’d like - I’m not able to use it at work - and this is the first time that Ubuntu’s presence has been absent (© J.P.Satre). Until now, all those little differences and difficulties have been as if I were wearing someone else’s shoes.
By David
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December 22, 2006
A long time ago I struggled to understand what the clique controlling my University’s student newspaper were on about in an issue published after they’d all been taught about Barthes, Lacan, Derrida et al. I guess this was shortly before the world stopped taking notice of the absurd Continenal postmodernists and before Alan Socal’s great Social Text hoax (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) and the publication of Intellectual Imposters.
By David
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December 22, 2006
A while back I mentioned Brazilian songster Caetano Veloso. Today I saw on Andrew Sullivan’s blog an entry posted by Clive Davis about a peculiar YouTube video, a mashup of Michael Jackson dancing to Veloso’s bossa nova cover of Billy Jean. Very odd it is indeed:
By David
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December 19, 2006
Annette’s finally persuaded the LSE to award her a PhD. This on top of producing Leo, seen here, and Sofia. Well done Doctor.
By David
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December 18, 2006
We’re moving into a new house and need to sort out phone and broadband as soon as we can. At the moment, our land line is provided by (rented from) British Telecom (BT) and ADSL broadband comes from Virgin. Both services have been fine so I tried to set up a similar arrangement at the new address.
By David
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December 14, 2006
I started listening to the Notes From Spain podcast (RSS etc here). It’s so engaging I’ve been downloading all the past podcasts and consequently learning loads about Spain.
Ben Curtis and his Spanish wife Marina bring you travel secrets, sound seeing tours, news, interviews, culture and more, from all corners of Spain.
