The man in black just walked past us in Oxford, and I’m pretty sure it was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He looked at me. I hope religion isn’t contagious.

Edit: wow, I phrased this badly…edited for clarity!

In Oxford today, and am happy to see that Trashing is prohibited. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds dirty.

I’m jealous of Ben Hammersley’s writing style. He has an amazing ability to draw me into his articles, and I often finish the final paragraph before becoming conscious I’m actually reading the whole thing (I generally read the first two paragraphs of Guardian stories before deciding whether to continue.) His latest piece is on an interest of mine: Getting Things Done.

GTD is a system of organisation refreshingly free of the usual corporate gobblespeak (except for the godawful official description, which is really bad - what were they thinking?) I bought the book back in May, and although I can’t claim to have implemented the system fully, it’s definitely helped me. Although Mr Hammersley’s article explains it very well, I’ll have a stab here. The premise is that your organisation should all be on paper, and not in your head. Whenever you are told or think of something that needs doing, it’s written down and placed into your Inbox. Items from the Inbox are processed daily, and are placed onto ‘action lists’. Critically, the lists contain the next physical action that must be performed to progress. So if you need to ‘plan a holiday’, the item that goes onto your action list may well be ‘go to travel agents and pick up brochures’. The idea is to clear your mind so that it’s free to work on solving problems, rather than worrying about them. The two core phrases of GTD are:

Mind like water - like a pebble falling into a pond, you should be able to react to new information then continue as you were.
What’s the next action? - this forces you to focus on progressing, and stops things stalling.

Like I said, there are better descriptions It’s more complicated than that, but not much. I haven’t leapt fully into the folds of GTD - more through fear of messing it up than any hardship - but have had some successes. I now use the Outlook Calendar properly, and everything coming up is in there so I won’t forget it. I’ve also been carrying around a Hipster PDA for the last few months, and it is the definitely the most useful thing I own. I have bits of paper everywhere, but I don’t experience ‘what was it I was thinking about…’ moments any more. It’s also amazing how useful index cards are for clarifying a point, leaving doodles for bemused waitresses or making tiny paper aeroplanes.

I’m planning to live by GTD once I’m in Stratford, as that’ll be an ideal jumping-on point. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend 43 Folders and its excellent introduction to the whole GTD concept.

Other than his remarkable ability to look older in films than real life, I knew nothing about Viggo Mortensen until a few moments ago…Now I think he’s cool

On Tuesday I spotted that my local cinema were showing Serenity a week early, in a special preview evening. I found out who wanted to go, arranged to leave dancing early, but have just discovered that I’m stupid. The cinema showtimes email has next Thursday’s preview screenings listed before this coming Friday’s showtimes, with unclear dates, which is just silly. Admittedly I should have checked properly; it was rather strange for a film to be shown a week before official release. So now I’m all disappointed - was looking forward to that! Ah well.

We worked on the car for much of yesterday afternoon, finishing it off today after an adapter cable arrived. It was fun! We had to dismantle much of the dashboard, using a variety of implements including the Big Red Taped-Up Screwdriver of Death, and got it all sorted without many problems, which was a refreshing situation!

The radio was replaced, and has a 3.5mm jack plug cable to let me plug the iPod directly into the speaker system. The radio itself has a face-plate that can be removed for security, and comes with a small box to keep it safe. However this afternoon the case fell out of my pocket, hit the ground, fell open and released the face-place, which collided with the concrete rather hard. It still works fine, but there are some dents in the control knobs, which is annoying! I think I might screw the face-plate on permanently, then I needn’t worry about carrying it around or somebody stealing it.

We also spray painted the ugly cream control knobs, and they’re now shiny black. It looks much nicer inside the car, now, and hopefully that’ll have added something to the resale value in a few years time. I’ll put up the before and after photos once I get copies.

I’ve been trying to get rid of the smoke smell too. All the upholstery has been febreezed and the front seats shampooed were shampooed last night. The surfaces have all been wiped down and polished, and while the dashboard was in pieces we cleaned out the air vents. It smells of a mixture of shampoo and lemon-fresh cleaning fluid at the moment, so I’ll give it a few weeks and see what happens.

I want to thank Ben very much for helping - I couldn’t have done it without all his knowledge and practical skills! I’ve never been into cars all that much, but I’ve enjoyed getting this one upgraded. Now if only the gear stick didn’t look so much like a penis…

• Giant squid are cool. They’re even called ‘giant squid’. Researchers have finally succeeded in photographing a giant squid in its natural environment. Previously there have been very small pictures of a juvenile and shots of an adult at the surface, but all other evidence has been gathered from bodies washed up on beaches or caught in nets.
• The Conservative Party are imploding again, I see.
• While the living conditions were undoubtedly hellish, it’s becoming apparent that widespread tales of armed militia, rapes and murders in the New Orleans refugee sites were massively exaggerated. As Buzzmachine points out, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t horrible for the people trapped, just slightly less horrible.
• Kermit’s going on tour. What about Gonzo?
• In an interesting and brave move, ‘junk food’ is to be banned in schools. This is almost entirely down to Jamie Oliver’s campaign last year, and is a hell of a result. I haven’t had time to read up on it fully, but given the quotes from nutritionists I’m tentatively in favour

Must go, have a bambi-eyed dog staring from under my desk.

I needed a driver for my printer, so went to the Epson website. I clicked the Support section, then selected ‘Printers’ from the drop down box. I then had to select the model, but it wasn’t in the list. Annoying. Maybe my printer counts as a ‘digital photo device’? Still no joy. This had all started when I wanted to print an envelope, and the whole thing was taking far longer than necessary. Why wasn’t my printer listed? Honestly, you’d think that Epson would keep these things up-to-date, it’s in their interests after all. It’s really not all that…huh…hmmm…my printer’s a Canon, isn’t it.

The Royal Astronomical Society want a public debate over the leap second. What’s a leap second? Here’s a rundown:

• We think of days as 24 hours long, and this is how our clocks view time.
• However, the Earth wobbles on its axis, and the day is not actually 24 hours long. The actual length is unpredictable as the wobble can be affected by many variables, including tectonic movement. However, for the past 200 years the spin has been slowing. The last time the average length of a day was 24 hours was in the 1800s.
• Many systems are time-critical, and it’s extremely convenient to have a definition of 1 second that isn’t linked to the unpredictable movement of the Earth. In the 1960s the official definition of the second was changed to the time taken for 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation which corresponds to the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom. This is easily measurable, and atomic clocks use this measurement to keep extremely accurate time. This is called UTC, or universal coordinated time (no, I don’t understand the acronym either.)
• So there are two systems of timekeeping, and they’re not the same. If you watch the position of the sun and time exactly how long it takes for the Earth to rotate seven times, it will take longer than the seven days as measured by an atomic clock. Although the difference is 0.002 seconds, over a year this adds up to 0.7 seconds. This is enough to cause problems.
• Leap seconds are added to UTC (the time as measured by atomic clocks) in order to keep them within 0.9 seconds of the time as measured by rotations of the Earth. As you’d expect, they’re added just under once a year. So far, leap seconds have always been extra seconds, but if the Earth started speeding up (as is currently thought is happening) there could be a second removed.

So, why abolish them? The reasons, taken from here, are as follows:

• leap seconds could cause disruptions where computers are tightly synchronized with UTC
• leap seconds are a rare anomaly to deal with, which is a worry in particular with safety-critical real-time systems (e.g., new concepts for air-traffic control entirely based on satellite navigation)
• exact astronomical time plays no significant role in most people

• Slashdot | Armed Dolphins Released Into Gulf of Mexico - What the hell?
• RPS - 15 - Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lightning-Devil-Dragon…

After phoning to confirm all was ready, this morning Ben and I headed over to Acocks Green to pick up the car. We signed the paperwork and were then given an introduction to the Micra’s workings. Ben spotted that the windscreen wipers were falling off so we had those replaced, as well as observing the

So here’s the thing. I want to learn how to swear in Chinese a la Firefly, but don’t actually want to look it up for fear of seeing Serenity spoilers…If anybody happens to know of a good primer, please let me know
Update on 8th October: Found one.

Update on 6th November: By far the best tutorial I’ve found was a recurring feature on the The Signal podcast

Have you heard of The Game? If so, sorry. If not, the rules are as follows:

1. To know The Game is to play The Game. One can never stop playing.
2. To think of The Game is to lose The Game.
3. When one loses The Game, one must announce to all present that one has lost.

And that’s all there is to it. Barry and I have been playing for probably two years now. Tonight we both caused the other person to lose first, thereby not losing ourselves. Here are two proven strategies:

1. Describe fnords. I am assured that it is a word only visible to members of the Illuminati, and brings comfort and joy. Bunnies, for example [UPDATE: Untrue, and I’ve linked to the wikipedia entry - see Simon’s comment]. Chances are, the person will state a word themselves. You then say ‘ah, but you’ve given it away now’. Chances are, this will cause a logical link to The Game, and he/she will be forced to admit his/her Losingness.
2. Quote verbatim from Life, The Universe and Everything, specifically the passage regarding the secret to flying unaided being to aim at the ground and miss. Describe how this requires a moment of total surprise nanoseconds prior to hitting the ground, and you must not concentrate on the act of flying, or you will be noticed by gravity and fail. Again, chances are he/she will think of The Game, and be a Big Massive Loser.

Obviously, you cannot attempt either of the two tactics consciously. You must think of them now, and forget the reasoning behind them. This is the path to victory.

BBC website says that Cindy Sheehan has been arrested outside the White House…Nobody else seems to have it yet. This could be most interesting
Later: I thought this would be a bigger story, but apparently not. It turns out she was arrested as part of a large group.

This story has no exciting climax - just wanted to point that out before starting.

Dad came downstairs this afternoon and said there was a strange smell in our spare room. It’s like something is going off, he says - vaguely urine-like. He hunted around but found nothing. Just now I was in the bathroom next to the spare room and heard a noise which sounded very much like something throwing up. The window was closed, and I was convinced it was above me, in the loft. It stopped after a few seconds, but was just like the sound our cat used to make when being sick, and my ears are still attuned to that particular noise. Before I’d even left the bathroom my brain was working on unpleasant explanations, varying from a bat to a burglar sleeping up there, which made opening the bathroom door a real pleasure.

Dad and I went into the loft and looked around, but couldn’t find very much. We did spot a new addition to the piles of junk that was either a shrivelled human brain or a recently fallen wasps’ nest. Hopefully the latter. I could vaguely detect the smell in the spare room, but nothing in the loft. It was long dead, thankfully. We looked for any signs of infestation but found nothing - no droppings, chewed bags or the like. A better hunt around the spare room was also fruitless, so I guess there was nothing to it. It could have been the central heating making squelching noises, I suppose. I’ve just noticed that there are fireworks outside, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Nevertheless: weird.