Finding origins

I've not been intending to do a post about this, but what the hell... For a few weeks now I've been running a blog where each day (Monday - Friday) I try and track down the origins of sayings/words/slang/phrases... It's actually been fairly fun, but today's one!!!



Argh!!



Bloody hard to track down, it took me nigh on 4-5 hours of following obscure lexical and etymological links and tantalizing references before I got (what I think is) the complete story... Satisfying to do though :-D



If you're at all interested the blog is: Daily Saying and today's post of Grouse has so far been the hardest one to track down.



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Is Atheism a religion?

Listening to Off The Wall, and during a discussion on religious vilification (the danish cartoon issue). Emmanuel Goldstein raised an interesting point:

"To say with certainty there is no god. You have to have some kind of faith system in play there..."

To claim something you can't possibly know (ie: what happens after death, be that harps vs pitchforks or that nothing happens) denotes faith in that belief. Interesting viewpoint...



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Multiple blogs

One of the problems of having 2 blogs is that occasionally I write a post for one, and mistakenly post it to the wrong one... I just did that for the last post (MSND event - yes it was meant to go on this blog, I sent it to the wrong one first).



Argh!

MSDN Event

Just a random geek post to say I've just spent the day at a MS tech conference, over what's new in VB.net, gotta say I like what I see. I especially like the idea of the my namespace and the way they've implemented the code snippets (oh and the refactoring helpers, very nice).



Plus it was nice to not be in at work :-)

Give Peas a chance

Spotted this on the Odd Spot (from The Age)

Englishwoman Louise Arnold is having therapy to overcome a fear of peas. The Cheltenham woman flees restaurants if she spots peas in meals and gets anxious in supermarkets. She gets little sympathy, however, from friends, who bought her a T-shirt saying: "Give peas a chance".

There was an article in the Metro the other day about the same woman (but I missed it), still funny though ;-)



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New house mate

Yay! After meeting various nutters, nice & quite, weird & quirky people, we've finally:

• Agreed on a person to offer the room to
  
• And they've accepted!
  

Now we can have our evenings/Sundays back to do... umm.. watching TV?



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Birte's birthday

It's been a good weekend over here in sunny (but cold) England, and today was the lovely Birte's birthday... She wanted to go and see an Elvis impersonator on Saturday night, which was a surprising amount of fun (aside from him not being that good a singer, and not really looking that much like elvis [what with him being black and not as good hair]).



There was a really nice stroke to my ego that night though, as I was standing there (with Celine, Maya & Claire) I got a tap on my arm from behind me, turning around there was a girl sitting down pointing towards the other side of the table. On which there was another girl with a camera, I had time to hear

"She thinks you're cute and wants a photo"

before being blinded by the flash, I hope I didn't look too much like a stunned mullet.



I said my thanks and that "I hope my fiancee agrees with you" (to cover all bases), and turned back to my friends. :-D



It's nice getting compliments, it's nice to give them too. The person receiving them may not respond in the way you hope, but they're unlikely to respond in the way you fear.



And that's enough good feeling/rambling from me.



Happy birthday Birte!

Happy St. Paddy's day!

Now to go drink some guiness! :-D (or shall I drink some Irish Whiskey?)

Living in London is cool

Ok, this'll be a very random post (considering the last one)... But living in London is sometimes really cool.



This one is for Dan, Rob, Loud & Mark (everyone else can ignore as they see fit).



I was helping Matt move in yesterday (Saturday) which was all fine and good, but on my way home I realised I was driving through the centre of London, over London Bridge while listening to Capital FM.



cool



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Weird night

Just got home from a nice night out in London, at a place called The Spitz (which is near where I work and also on the edge of Spitalfields Markets [hence the name])..



Anyways, the Spitz is a bit of an alternative music venue and myself & Ryan (housemate) were out having a good time listening to some funky blues, when right at the tail end of the night this girl comes up to me and says

"I'm British born and bred.. and you disgust me."

Like the title says, weird night... I have no idea what her problem was, did she think I was foreign and was making some kind of racist comment? Did she think I was British and because I was at the club with a guy, that I was gay? Did she think I looked at her weirdly and so wanted to get back at me?



Intellectually I know it's not my problem and it's her issue... But I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me, though the thing that annoys me the most about it is that I was having a really nice night, tapping my feet along to the music, chatted to some random strangers about Belgium beer. And now my night's had a dampner put on it because of some random nutter, which is going to colour my memory of the venue and the music...



Argh!!!



Oh well, I'm going to read/do something so that I can fall asleep thinking about something else entirely. Night people.



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Usability

Just saw this quote on Joel on Software, made me laugh...

"Bad usability in the design of aircraft controls can result in what is cheerfully referred to as CFIT: Controlled Flight Into Terrain"

See: Usability in One Easy Step (First Draft) for more info

A reality show I can get into

I've been complaining recently about the amount of reality shows on the tv... But now there's a reality show I think I could get into: American Inventor aparently it's like 'American Idol' except for geeks.



Instead of saying a straight out No! For this reality show I think I could raise it up to it has potential..



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spotted on gadgetopia