Below are the most recent 11 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, December 20th, 2009
marnanel	10:57a	Meep This story rather reminded me of chess. A US school district threatened suspension to all students who say the word "meep". (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
marnanel	7:08p	Answers to crossword clues 2A. Part of it's a turning body (6) SATURN, guessed by many people. This is a very traditional sort of clue. "Part of" indicates a substring search. "itSATURNing" contains the substring. "Body" is the surface clue: Saturn is a heavenly body. The other two don't follow the traditional surface/deep model: 3A. What the town of Titipu was to the Mikado (8) SUBTITLE, guessed by a few people. The operetta's full name is "The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu". I like this because it leads people up the garden path: they spend hours trying to figure out the proper term for a city ruled by an emperor, and how to fit it in eight letters. 1A. Get rid of the stuff legally (4, 4) TAKE SILK. Nobody got this. It's a pun on "stuff", which also means the substance that entry-level gowns are made from. Lawyers in the UK (and some other Commonwealth countries) wear stuff gowns until they reach the exalted heights of Queen's Counsel, when (in the same way that PhDs do) they exchange their stuff gown for a silk one. This is known as "taking silk". Again, garden path: you are supposed to think of some contraband substance which you must "get rid of legally", but that's not what it means at all. (Comment on this)
marnanel	6:59p	A thing I don't understand about Project Wonderful I have three sites currently running Project Wonderful ads. One of them is Joule; another is shavian.org.uk. Joule has a "skyscraper"-size (160x600) sidebar on every chart page. It gets about 800 hits a day. shavian.org.uk has a "button"-size (117x30) image at the top left. It gets about 50 hits a day. Consistently, the shavian.org.uk ads have been selling for 20¢/day and the Joule ads for around 1¢/day. I don't get why people are willing to pay twenty times as much for the shavian.org.uk ads. In fact, of course, the bids are mostly placed by bots which are given a certain sum of money and told to go and spend it, but that doesn't decrease the mystery. If I had a lot of spare time I would try running control experiments. Is it the fact that the lack of available space makes people want it more (i.e. in general people are more likely to bid higher for buttons than skyscrapers?) That seems strange. Is it that shavian.org.uk is a site under "books and writing", whereas Joule is about "blogging tools"? Is it just coincidence? I don't know, but I'd like to. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
marnanel	2:08a	The Secret Garden So I'm currently reading The Secret Garden to Rio. In the first scene, the protagonist is rescued from her house by the army after having slept through a cholera epidemic that killed everyone she knows: "I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?" "It is the child no one ever saw!" exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. "She has actually been forgotten!" "Why was I forgotten?" Mary said, stamping her foot. "Why does nobody come?" The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away. "Poor little kid!" he said. "There is nobody left to come." At this, Rio mumbled, "Everybody's dead, Dave. Dave, everybody's dead." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
marnanel	2:58p	Crossword clues I have set These are some of my favourite crossword clues I have set. 1A. Get rid of the stuff legally (4, 4) 2A. Part of it's a turning body (6) 3A. What the town of Titipu was to the Mikado (8) Want to guess? If you don't get them I'll tell you tomorrow. In case you are totally befuddled by what this might mean, I will also explain why. :) (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
marnanel	4:08p	Time for a silly poll. Time for a silly poll. Human perception is a fascinating thing. Poll #1499898 Thinking of... Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 15 If you mentioned me and someone asked you who I am, what would you say? How do you think of me? How do you think I think of you? Feel free to copy this into your own journal, so I can answer it for you! (Comment on this)
Monday, December 14th, 2009
marnanel	1:26p	Clearly the Internet wanted to know (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
marnanel	10:05a	Joule So, is http://joule.marnanel.org working for you? If it isn't, tell me. If it is, tell your friends. A few reports are coming in of Twitter/identi.ca support reporting that valid accounts don't exist. I'll be investigating. Updates: - There's definitely a problem with Twitter. Looking into it. - We'd love some signal-boosting. Could you post and tell your friends that Joule is back? - Some folk have asked whether they can give money towards hosting fees. I know nobody has much spare money at this time of year, but if you'd still like to paypal us a few dollars, here's the button: - If you like magical realism, you can also make me happy by buying a copy of my book (it's US$1.99 for the e-book and US$7.99 for a paper copy), and telling your friends about that in turn. - xkcd seems to survive on selling t-shirts. I wonder whether anyone would be interested in Joule shirts... (36 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
marnanel	9:46p	Fixing Joule So let's see if we can have Joule online again by midnight. I'll be liveblogging it here. We need to: get coffee DONE. back everything up DONE.  It's 2.1Gb. find out how many users are on the raisin system DONE. There are 18760 (about 5% of the total, but the most regular users are on it) convert them back to currant DONE roll back the comparator to use currant DONE turn everything on again and hope it works DONE... Here is a question: how will people know when it's back?  Should I just leave it to word of mouth, or announce it somewhere?  And if I should announce it-- where? (11 Comments |Comment on this)
marnanel	3:15p	Not Ordinarily Borrowable on Smashwords Those of you who don't read me on Twitter may like to know that Not Ordinarily Borrowable is now available on smashwords.com, where you can pay US$1.99 (about £1.20) to read the whole thing in HTML or PDF right in your browser, or download it in a variety of ebook formats. Seems like a pretty good deal to me. (And it's passed manual inspection there, which means that the book will be available on Barnes and Noble's ebooks site, in a few days.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
marnanel	4:56p	Links roundup It's been a while since I made a general post, but here are some of the links that have accumulated since then: I've often wondered what Amazon's distribution centre looks like. The Punchtape Letters. Like Screwtape, only for programming. The Simpsons, as they would have been drawn by various artists. It's a velociraptor skull.  Or a bell pepper. "Ditto". Cooking Q&A.  This is stackoverflow used for recipes. Post this macro if people confuse the words "vulva" and "vagina".  Probably NSFW. (3 Comments |Comment on this)