Palfrey's life

Life has been somewhat busy these past few. Spending a lot of hot weather time on the Tube is not so good, but getting to see people and places is. So, here's a recap:

• Sat: Met up with ariiadne, alextielfing, friend_of_tofu, and hazyjayne and wandered Borough Market. For a while there, I thought I was never going to be able to smell anything aside from cheese ever again... for those of you in the London area who have never visited, go now. Bought New Forest Cider, a bizarre gueuze/mead mixed thing, and some very nice fudge. Me and ariiadne then wandered off, doing a brief bit of the whole tourist thing (I now I think I probably have been on Tower Bridge at some random time before, but damned if I know when). Nice to see a bit of the old home city again, if only for a brief while. Pics from this day are here.


• Sun: Got up at the crack of dawn (9am) and went to see kentish grandmother. Bought fudge from the good shop in Chatham. Returned back to London, being dropped off at the Tesseract on the way (name of ariiadne/alextielfing's place) for fun geeky evening :-). In addition to the aforementioned people from Saturday, I also met voodoo_canape and envoy. Much fun, cookies, my first game of Mao, MST3K, game theoretical discussions re: life, universe, everything, etc, etc. Much fun. Also got lots of music off of hazyjayne which I still haven't had time to sort through.


• Mon: The previously mentioned transhumanist meeting thing. Pretty interesting discussions, mostly on a "where do we go from here/what the heck is the role we should be going for" stuff, which is one of those things that I've never really figured out, so I'm glad that others have the same problem. There appears to be a current attempt at rebranding from "transhumanism" to "transhumanitarians" (partly a "people don't like -ism's" thing, partly a note that humanitarians tend not to get called elitist). To be honest, my involvement with the whole movement is fairly minimal, and my level of actual effort is even smaller. I'm just going with the "wait and see" attitude. On the plus side, I got a discounted copy of Kurzweil's latest ("The Singularity Is Near").


• Tues: I have a hell of a lot of books. So many in fact, that I lose track of exactly which ones I have. Therefore, cataloguing is necessary, but in some way that doesn't drive me nuts. Hence my recent purchasing of an old :CueCat off of eBay. After some work (and two different ps/2=>usb adaptors), I now have a way to easily scan in the UPC numbers from the back of my books, which get translated to ISBNs, and then other software goes off and grabs author/title/cover data and dumps all of this in a little database. Yay. So far I've scanned two shelves worth (actual scan time was ~5 mins, more time to setup software), and hopefully I'll get enough time to do the rest of the books that are still here and not in the lockup before I go back. Eventually, I'm going to build a nice frontend for all of this, possibly even dump them up online, and have a copy of the collection dumped into my old Palm Pilot so I can get at the list while I'm in secondhand books trying to remember whether I have the nth book in a series or not.

Oh, and having dropped the gueuze/mead thing in the freezer last night, intending to pull it out 20 mins later but forgetting, I've now got a frozen solid bottle. Darn. Hopefully it'll defrost without too much damage. Of course, I've never had this particular drink before, so I won't be able to tell what is freezer damage and what isn't...

The New Forest cider people have a nice rhyme on their site which I feel is worth sharing:


K, must go and do other things now...