Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

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... (31 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)
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
chess	7:50p	The Copthorne Hotel, Birmingham I would just like to publically disrecommend this establishment. My room only managed to have distinctly see-through curtains, threadbare carpets and a distinctly intermittent water supply which made loud noises rather early in the morning, but colleagues of mine managed such delights as finding the bloodstains of previous tenants on the sheets, having the shower adjuster come off in their hand, mold in the bathroom, and similar unpleasantness. That is all. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
marnanel	1:30p	Sermons This just popped into my head: Many years ago I was listening to a sermon. The priest held up two pieces of paper. "What makes this one worth five pounds, and this one not?" (I don't know what his text was; something like Ps.145:13, perhaps.) The same man kept calling out: "It doesn't have the watermark." "It doesn't have the hologram." "It doesn't have the silver strip down the middle." Eventually, the priest peered down at him and boomed, "Are you an expert forger, sir?" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
marnanel	8:26a	Talkers So suppose there was a spod client for the N900. Suppose it had a dialogue at the start to pick a talker. Which talkers should it come preloaded with? (Snowplains, obviously; what else is still around?) (5 Comments |Comment on this)