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Digital Dreams

Hi. I still use LJ, follow my friends and similar, but I've moved my main host to Dreamwidth now, and am crossposting everything to here, but asking people to comment there.

Mat Bowles.

It's still fully interoperative, the OpenID comment functions there are good and improving, and I can follow everything from both sites easily.

GIP* for @Paul0Evans1 / paulevans

  • Nov. 19th, 2009 at 2:49 PM
Anarchist
[*]Gratuitous Icon Post

The t-shirt is in the wash, but the text on the picture is accurate and answers his question.

Copy of this post on Dreamwidth, where there are comment count unavailable comments I'd prefer it if you comment there if you are able to keep the discussion together.

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*click*bzzzz*reboot from start...

  • Oct. 27th, 2009 at 12:27 AM
Anarchist
Apparently, if I stop posting here, people will start ringing me to check I'm ok, or wondering what I'm up to, or other similar things. This is especially true if I just, y'know, stop writing stuff and stop commenting elsewhere.

Well, I did. It started as a weekend break from t'internet in which I didn't even look at my email, then it turned into a few months where I simply scanned my email for important stuff, occasionally checked into Twitter, but otherwise didn't read any of my reading, friends or feed pages and simply turned off. Honestly? It's been good.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing. What I have been doing is enjoying life in many respects.

Learnt how to bake and cook

I've learnt, not just how to bake (which is quite easy), but also how to actually, y'know, properly cook. I am no longer scared by a recipe that requires I chop an onion. I know what a vichyssoise is (but not how to spell it), and have even made one. My carrot, cream and orange soup, adapted from Mary Berry's recipe, is quite simply gorgeous, and I successfully made baguettes yesterday.

I've been helping [info - personal] miss_s_b in the garden, in which we have potatoes, beetroot, oregano and even scented geraniums growing well. The newly planted garlic is already sprouting, so that'll be nice for next year.

Biggest bestest cake in the world

I've been spending time with [info - personal] amazing_holly, reading, playing games, cooking and having fun. I managed to get her to teach herself the basics of multiplication and division while baking a cake. I even, as a reward for her for sticking with learning to be good enough at Speed Racer to actually beat Mummy in a championship cooked, with her, the biggest bestest cake that Mister Mat has ever made! which has, somehow, now become the biggest bestest cake in the world. Well, she is 6. It was fun making it though, even if it was so big it had gone dry before we finished it.

But also? I've been playing games. A lot of games. For this you can mostly blame [info - personal] liadnan. Y'see, awhileback I had a catastrophic OS failure involving a critical Fx vulnerability and a dodgy porn site, and we gave up on fixing Windows and switched to Ubuntu for the main desktop. I had some problems getting a few things to work, and he pointed me at the wonder that is the world of Linux repositories. So I installed some, to see what I could find.

Open source, extendable games

Mostly, I found games. Open Source, extendable, games. Based on some wonderful classics like Elite, Civilisation, Sin City and similar. I will, I hope, write up the ones I enjoyed, just so I can have a record of them. I may even write up the ones I hated, to remind me not to install them again. In the meantime, I'm back. I've been reading, and even commenting on, most of my reading pages, and plan to completely reorganise them to keep my sanity in place.

In the meantime, enough about me, what've you guys been up to, have I missed much?

Copy of this post on Dreamwidth, where there are comment count unavailable comments I'd prefer it if you comment there if you are able to keep the discussion together.

Links, pics, silliness and stuff

  • Jun. 26th, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Webstuff
K, looks like I kinda forgot to update for awhile. Oops. You know what that means right? A backlog of silly, informative, thinkworthy or merely funny links. In no particular order:

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite". Sounds fun to me. Street View solves Dutch mugging. See? Useful. Random chance, but still useful.

Next up, researchers do study that finds obvious finding. Except it's not obvious, because if it were, you wouldn't still have idiot politicians the world over trying to pretend the exact opposite is true :-( Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study of children whose parents stay together for the sake of the kids: ( more explanation with longer quote ) What matters is the quality of the parenting and the attitude they inculcate to opportunity, not whether they pretend to be happy for the kids sake.

Neologism of the Day—Huxleyed:

To have died with a degree of fame or notoriety that would have guaranteed extensive media coverage, save for the death of someone even more famous or notorious immediately afterwards. From Aldous Huxley, who died an hour before President Kennedy was assassinated. Usage: "Farrah Fawcett was completely Huxleyed by Michael Jackson."

And on that subject, this comic is particularly apposite:
( 'A famous person has died, we go live to somewhere tangentially related' )

One of my favourite authors is, as many of you know, Charles Stross, also known as [info - personal]autopope, he's up for the Hugos, again, this year, and has been writing an auto-biographical series of blog posts for the last week or so that I've been meaning to link to as they are, frankly, quite funny, and also count as a nice little rundown of the history of how the web came to be—you can blame the need for a robots.txt file on him, and his time working for a Demon subcontractor where part of my official job description was to keep Danny the tomcat from pissing on the modem rack is also amusing.

This is really cool to know, assuming that they're on the button: All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. Unlike in many other species, we have multiple possible mutations that could make us, for example, short, and populations famous for small stature, like pygmies, simply have a large number of them instead of one specific key change. Same applies to things like the ability to tolerate cows milk.

Now, simple little question, how many colours are there in the following pattern (via):
( Spiral image pattern with clever optical illusion )
Yup, that's right, there are ( look at the image first damnit! ) colours there, funny how our mind tricks us by filling in assumed blanks, full explanation at Bad Astronomy.

Not sure about this one: science explains why Yorkshiremen like pies so much. Um, I like pies, and I only moved up here 18 months ago (SRSLY, a whole 18 months). Shame that decent non-meat pies are a pain to get hold of. Still, really happy about this one: Alastair Reynolds scores unprecedented 10-year, 10-book deal from Gollancz for his 'mean line in alien cultures and technology'. Completely different writing style to Charlie, but one I also really like, and it's nice to see grand sweeping plots with a background that seems to make sense. In 'so obvious now you think of it' mode, I concur with [info]rhodri, I really hope that the designer of The folding plug makes lots and lots of money, especially the multi-plug adapter design. I wants them I does...

Slightly more seriously, [info - staff]denise got interviewed for American NPR, and it's another case of stating the obvious until people listen—social networks that try to make money from ad revenue are going to be in trouble, much better to provide a service people actually want (in DW's case, damn fine blog hosting with a good feed aggregation service bolted on) and charge users for it in some way. By the way, no link for this one, Livejournal is soon going to allow people to host their own adverts on a revenue-sharing model; I personally have less of a problem with this than the way they're plastered all over the dormant basic accounts now, but some of you might like to know...

On the subject of blogging, one of its principle strengths has always been what's called "the long tail"—( defined )this tail is getting a lot shorter. Charles Arthur at The Guardian explains why. ( I mostly agree )

Back to silliness. The US economy was too reliant on crap made by General Motors. Have a look at this: Ten Vehicles That Bankrupted GM. Seriously, these things sold? Ouch.

Now, it can't have escaped the notice of most of you that have met me that my wardrobe is, shall we say, a little bit monochrome. [info]susannah_banana claims I'm not a goth because I'm not goth enough. She's one of the DJs at one of the top goth nights in the UK, but she's wrong, here's why: About Goth [stereo] Types - All Types. I am #19, and I claim my £5. (created by [info]sinju, a now defunct journal that was very very cool while she was still documenting her time in Japan).

WANT

More sciency stuff: Flourescent lightbulbs are not the saviour they're being sold as and incandescents have still got some light in them yet. Personally, I can't stand reading by the horribly light they output (we use candles by the bed) and they set of my photic sneeze reflex something chronic.

BASTARDS

One of the best uses of animation within a webcomic I've seen, very cleverly done.

Royal British Legion to Nick Griffin MEP, leader of the BNP: Stop it, Mr Griffin. Just stop it. First rule of politics: don't piss off the veterans association.

OK, that's loads. I've cut the images and longer explanations, but left the rest open for easy clicking—if I do a post this long again is that still the best plan?
Original post on Dreamwidth, I prefer to keep all the comments there, if you have trouble using OpenID let me know, it's still in beta and subject to improvement.

Apes aren't monkeys damnit!

  • Jun. 26th, 2009 at 12:21 AM
Bitchcakes
Dear BBC.

You've just assaulted my eardrums with some music—in a news report on Radio 4, a radio station which has as a selling point a lack of music.

In it, the reporter revealed, once again, a complete lack of basic understanding. Chimpanzees are APES, not MONKEYS. Please send your reporters on a refresher course. I'm sure this little guy is upset enough, you don't need to insult him as well.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/364803.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Brain fried—send aircon

  • Jun. 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 PM
Aten't Dead
Those of you enjoying this supposedly "glorious" weather? Spare a thought for those of us that just cannot function in this heat. At all.

Notwithstanding the photic sneeze reflex making going outside (and even driving) a little annoying, the massively high risk of skin cancer groups I'm in from both sides of my family, my brain just seizes up when it's this hot.

I moved to the North to get away from this sort of weather damnit!

European elections linkdump and ramble )

Coherence might happen tomorrow, if I a) get some sleep and b) have a good brain day.

Appeal, if you live in London, consider voting for Jonathan Fryer, he bought me beer and is thus a top bloke )

Sorry, I said my brain was fried, right?

In the meantime, [info] - personalmiss_s_b dragged me to B&Q today so she could buy more plant pots and stuff to put in them. We got more basil, rocket, oregano and other useful stuff. She also bought a chilli plant. It's a chilli that'll burn your mouth off at 50 paces. It's sat next to her at her computer desk as it needs to be brought in at night.

She's called it George.

I'm doomed.
[1]Honest, it would be.

Baking suggestions: What should I cook?

  • May. 28th, 2009 at 9:42 PM
Hungry
OK, [info] - personalmiss_s_b cooked us a lovely veggie cottage pie this evening, with cheap garlic bread using a baguette from Tesco's bargain bin.

So I need to cook pudding after Shrub's gone to bed. I've done loads of steam puddings recently, as well as cookies, muffins, biscuits and bread variants (recipes might get posted on request, I still have the bread recipe in drafts somewhere). So...

Any suggestions?


Preferably not involving nuts (because I'm allergic) or chocolate (as Jennie's allergic). Stuff involving syrup or jam is an added bonus but not essential.

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Webstuff
A nice little mix of stuff in this lot, though the politics averse amongst you should be warned that with elections next week there's a fair bit on that, though not much of it is serious. Also posted to DW with comments open, linkspams don't crosspost easily due to limitations at Delicious.

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Politics
Ever thought about the influence geography has on the way you vote? You probably ought to, it's had a massive effect on me. Y'see, I grew up in the 80s and did my GCSEs and A Levels in the 90s. that's under Thatcher and Major. But that's not the main reason I distrust the Conservative party, nor the main reason I hate the Tories[1]. That can be explained by a very simple statement.

Anthony Steen was my MP. He's still the MP for my parents, both surviving grandparents, two aunts and four cousins. Yes, that Anthony Steen. For a very very simple reason to hate the git[2], have a listen to this[3]:
BBC flash embed of the audio of the interview. I can listen to this again and again and again, it makes me happy )
I've met him. He visited my school a few times when I was a kid, and I met him subsequently. He really is like that. That interview has effectively ended his fairly undistinguished career. The great shame is that he's been forced out, because despite him representing one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, his behaviour since re-election in 2005 has been, well, interesting, and I reckon he'd have lost without the most recent revelations. Here are some highlights:
A summary list of some of the more egregious idiocies he's managed )

So, there you go. Due to the nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system, if you have a git like that as your MP, if you want to get rid of him, you have to vote for the candidate most likely to beat him. If you get used to voting for that party time and time again because they're the best chance of beating the incumbent git, many people begin to consider themselves supporters specifically of that party.

In 1997, I voted in my first General Election, and specifically voted against Steen. It was a vote for the Lib Dem candidate, but also broadly a vote to get the bastard Tories out and replace them with Blair. I often wonder what, if any, my partisan allegiance would be if I grew up in a part of the world where the Lib Dems were a distant third and Labour were challenging the Tories. Let alone if I'd grown up in a safe Labour area where the Tories had no chance.

One of the stupidities of the UK system is that where you live matters a lot more than who you support. I think it's about time we changed that, how about you?

Footnotes )

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/363629.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Family, donchajustlovem?

  • May. 18th, 2009 at 11:28 PM
Life
So, today was the 2nd annual visit of the parents. They do a lot of weekends away, spent last weekend in Cheshire at an event and have an event next weekend in North Yorkshire, so they come to visit us today and tomorrow.

So we have an attack of planned vs actual.

So, about that late afternoon arrival time... )

My Mum orders a 'snack' lunch for us... )

A damn fine evening meal, only slightly spoiled by not having enough space left in our bellies... )

Tomorrow? We might go to Holmfirth. We might go to Wakefield for the National Sculpture Park (if only just to annoy Germaine "call me Professor" Greer). Don't know yet. I do know it requires us meeting my parents and the ungodly early hour of 10am. Wish us luck.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/363225.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Linkspam for 14-5-2009

  • May. 14th, 2009 at 4:46 PM
Webstuff

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Star Trek and the Small Person

  • May. 12th, 2009 at 9:36 PM
Cool
I knew, when I moved in with [info]miss_s_b, that I was moving in with a massive SF geek. What I didn't realise at the time was the extent that I was moving in with two SF geeks, one of whom was 4 and will be 6 next month.

Today, we took her to see her first film in the cinema. Given she's watched every single episode of TOS and has the Animated Series in her pile of favourite DVDs, the choice was obvious and we figured there was a good chance she'd enjoy it.

We were slightly worried, as it's certificate 12A, which means kids only with an adult, but I did look it up on the rating site and the reasons given made it look like it was fine for her. It was—she had to hold Mummy's hands a few times and give her a hug when Mummy got upset and emotional, but, y'know, what are 5-year-olds for if not to look after their big soppy mother?

I'll spare you the acclamatory review. The casting was excellent, the characters were played perfectly, the whole establishment of the parallel universe thing was cool, the science was suitable crap and full of PSB, they made up at least two impossible plot devices, and I didn't want to kill Simon Pegg. Nimoy was cool, the girl playing Uhura was gorgeous (#29), and there were lots of big bangs and cool explosions.

They didn't destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, but came close—perhaps an actual Trekkie can explain to me why they built the HQ of Star Fleet, the most important institution in the galaxy, on the wrong side of a major fault line?

Anyway—go see, and if the kids like SF, take 'em, just be prepared to hold their hands a few times.

Her review? As the credits rolled:
Is it over? I don't want it to be over.
On the way to the car:
Me: What was the best bit Miss Holly?
[info]amazing_holly: All of it.
She was genuinely upset that there wasn't more to see. Wrath of Khan with her soon then (we've got two copies of the DVD after all).

ETA: Jennie's write up is here.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/362717.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[DW] Profile link icons update.

  • May. 7th, 2009 at 5:11 PM
Webstuff
In my Monday post about icons, I gave replacement codes for the 5 icons that DW commonly uses as well as the 3 that LJ commonly uses. I missed one that DW uses, namely direct links to LJs using the new custom site code.

If you didn't know, rather than the old [lj-user="matgb"] code, DW has replaced it with [user name="matgb"], ie removing the LJ bit given, obviously, it's not on LJ. But cunningly, they've also added another option, if you code [user name="matgb" site="livejournal.com"] it will link to matgb on LJ, not DW. And it'll take the LJ usericon from the LJ server as well.

Which would be cool. Except it doesn't auto-discover whether it's a person, community or feed. So my post Tuesday mentioning the Russian President's blog displayed it as a person, not as a community. Which I think is slightly unintuitive and misleading. So I've fixed that.

I've added another bit of code for DW so that off-site links to LJs instead display the LJ pencil, to show it's something on LJ, not a bloke regardless of what it is on LJ. So, if you look at this post on DW using my style, it'll show the little pencil when I repeat the link. Look: [info]blog_medvedev. I suspect I could keep doing these for ages—if you regularly link to IJ, WP, JF or whatever people, y'know what? Sort your own code out, ask me if you need help.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/362303.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Social media inward looking wankery

  • May. 5th, 2009 at 10:01 PM
Blogging
Couldn't resist writing this one up: In post-Soviet Russia, President blogs you. The President of Russia has a Livejournal ([info]blog_medvedev) and updates it (or gets someone to, anyway) fairly regularly.

( LJ, its future, DW not a threat and SUp taking it in the wrong direction )

Ah well. I'm supposed to be writing up what's wrong with the OpenID implementation on both LJ and DW, but I keep getting distracted.

Short version: ( Both sites are problematic, DW has the excuse of being new, LJ has no excuse at all )

That's pathetic. Hopefully the competitive pressure from DW will push them into making more improvements, like it has done elsewhere. Competition is, after all, a good thing, and LJs been stuck in its own little rut with nowt but a bunch of clones for too long.

Meh, rambling. Time to go do something constructive.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/362185.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Webstuff
One of the things I like about journalling platforms based on the LJ codebase is the easy shortcut for usernames that'll link to both the blog itself and the profile, with that nice little logo for the profile link.



LJ

DW

Mine

User

LJ User Icon

DW User Icon

Little Colin Baker

Community

LJ Comm Icon

DW Comm Icon

Little Tardis!

Feed

LJ Feed Icon

DW Feed Icon

Little Dalek!

Others
Little Peter! Little Mr Flibble! LJ userbloke
Thing is, the nice little logo doesn't always suit the style of the place it's appearing in, or the colour scheme of the layout. So, given I know how to replace them, I thought I'd update the code and add some new tweaks. As always, CSS hackery, playing with CSS is both fun and easy, I highly recommend it for people of a web-savvy nature.

I have, naturally, chosen a Doctor Who theme to my replacement images—feel free to replace them with something else if you wish. I forget where I got the original code for to do this, it's heavily updated now, but I'd like to credit the author, so if you know, gimme a link?

Anyway. Dreamwidth users should go to the DW Custom CSS page and paste the code into the big box.

Livejournal users should go to the LJ Custom CSS page and, go on, have a guess...

Yup, copy and paste the code into the box. One little caveat—it's replacing images taken from l-stat.livejournal.com, if LJ changes their CDN again, then the URL might change and the code'll stop working, I'll update it as soon as I know to, it's likely to be a simple change the letter hack (it used to be p-stat.*)

The Colin icon is taken from [info]allah_sulu's Ten Doctor's. If you want to use different images, then replacing the image location is fairly easy, just make sure you also change the dimensions in the 'padding' area, the first two are effectively height and width.

I deliberately haven't done one for OpenID accounts, I might change my mind on that but I think the OpenID logo ought to be got used to. I'm considering a DW staff replacement, but not sure what I should go for (either Five or appeal a bit). Haven't bothered with sponsored Comms, probably ought to, not doing so means the image won't show up at all.

As always, feel free to link or comment with questions, etc.

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/361968.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Look, a poll in a post

  • May. 3rd, 2009 at 3:25 PM
Cool
OK, testing again. Using the Dreamwidth poll wizard, then looking to see if/how polls crosspost to LJ. Odds are you'll need to login with OpenID to vote, etc, but it's about time you did that anyway.

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Baking Cinnamon Biscuits

  • May. 1st, 2009 at 1:38 AM
Hungry
So, SB gets home from Liberal Drinks (Manchester), several sheets to the wind and craving biscuits. So I baked biscuits. Loosely based on a recipe for Ginger Nuts from Delia (for USians, if you've not heard of her, she's Alton Brown in a twin set. Who runs a football team as a hobby. Also, they're a type of biscuit. Which is sort of like a cookie, but not. And yes, we get the 'nuts' joke).

ingredients )Instructions )
Eat. If there are any left (weirdo), then store them in an airtight container. There are never any left in this house. eats them all.

(Crossposted to OMNOMNOM on DreamWidth)

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Cool
In amazing news released today, HBO television and renowned author George R. R. Martin have announced they have made a deal with a convicted terrorist(s?[1]) in order to film a series based on Martin's Game of Thrones in territory controlled by the terrorist.

OK, the convictions may be over 30 years old, and McGuinnes might now be a senior Northern Ireland politician and deputy first minister, but even so, how cool is this?
During our recent trip to Los Angeles, the First Minister and I met with senior executives from HBO to help finalise the deal to bring the TV production here
~~Martin McGuinness
It's confirmed, not only are they making a series based on the books, but it's going to be flimed in Belfast, and the two most senior NI politicos were heavily involved in negotiating the deal and made a joint statement announcing it's been finalised. (via)

Of course, the real question is---SPOILER! )
[1] See comments, [info]Nicholas Whyte asserts that Robinson is also a former terrorist, and knows more than me on these issues.

Gotta love the Gu

  • Apr. 22nd, 2009 at 12:01 AM
Hungry
So, a lot of the recipes I've been looking at going Hmm, yes please last few days have required ramekins to cook them in. We don't have any ramekins.

So while in Sainsbury's today, we had a look. Because Jennie thinks the idea of home cooked creme caramel is a good one, and I wants to make me some mouse.

Options:

Individual ramekins in the cookery/homeware isle= £1.50 each.
Gu chocolate puds, complete with nommy chocolate pud and perfectly acceptable ramekins= £1.50 for two, on offer.

Hmm, that was a tough choice. So now I need to cook up and eat 3 more gu puds. Because I had one earlier, and it was lovely. Although I reckon I could make them just as good now I know what I'm doing.

I need a food/cooking icon. Someone want to make/recommend me one?

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Holy electronic cover version, Batman!

  • Apr. 20th, 2009 at 7:26 PM
Cool
I am having difficulty figuring out words for describing how cool this is:

My quote of the day is from the description:
Keep in mind the scanner and floppy drive are not musical instruments. These are mechancial devices whose frequencies tend to drift and can cause some notes to be out of tune.
Seriously, how cool is that? (via)

Also, I'm testing the DW crossposter, apparently there are issues with post edits and embedded videos that we need to iron out. So comments off on LJ and on on DW, I don't plan on making a habit of this until it's way out of closed beta, but you all know me and plans...

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/360502.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
ETA:Um, yeah, some horrible glitch, for some time, this was displaying as the tesla orchestra 1812 I posted awhileback, now fixed to the correct cover of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Digital dreams redux

  • Apr. 20th, 2009 at 9:40 AM
Anarchist
OK, forgot to tick a box on the crossposter, let's try that again.

If you're already on Dreamwidth then really, nothing to see here...

This are a test post. There is nothing really to see. However, if you fancy following the link and saying hello to test the OpenID login, that'd be cool.

Gotta love beta testing features, this might not even work...

ETA: not only does it work, but apparently it auto-edits as well. How cool is that?

This entry was originally posted at http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/360244.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Introspection

I'm Mat Bowles, a Devonshire lad displaced to Yorkshire. I'm a part-time analyst, marketer and website manage, although mostly I'm a house-husband.

Wikio - Top BlogsThis is my personal general interest journal where I write about or link to whatever I've fond that amused, intrigued or enraged me at the time. I'm a committed liberal, equalist and atheist, but I really like it when people can demonstrate I'm wrong, and have close friends with whom I completely disagree on some if not all of those points.

Coalition For Choice

There probably ought to be a Creative Commons licence in here somewhere but in the meantime consider this permission to quote me (link) & link to what I write.

If you decide to keep reading, please do say hello, let me know where you found me from, etc. I promise not to bite (well, unless you want me to...)

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