a-cubed.info

A relatively standard psychomteric test, so far as I can tell.

My Personality

Yes, Minister has always been tragically true to the reality of UK government. Yet another example of how close to the reality was mentioned today on BBC News 24. In a discussion about the impact of the comprehensive spending review on DEFRA, it was mentioned that “all departments are having to find a 5% administrative saving”. There was an episode of Yes, Minister in which that was the exact source (even the same number) of a battle between the Minister and Humphrey.

I was reading my weekly copy of the THES on Sunday and spotted an advert which I mis-read on an initial scan. It was for a lecturer in interior design, but I first read it as “inferior design”.

As some of you know, I had a slightly worrying time for the last month in Japan since during worldcon my mother had rung me to say that there was a debt collection agency letter in Reading saying I owed Volkswagen Finance £4,700. So, after I got back, I contacted the debt collection company, who were pretty unhelpful and delayed further action for a week but required me to get a crime number before they’d do anything else. The police, on their crime reporting phone line, wouldn’t give me a crime number without more details that the debt collection agency wouldn’t (or couldn’t) give me, like at what address the loan was taken out, for what vehicle etc. Once I felt like I was stuck in a cross between Kafka and Heller, the police crime recorder threw me a lifeline, telling me that I should go to a local Volkswagen dealer (she even gave me the phone number and address of one in Reading) and report the loan as fraud to them.

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While heading back to the UK from Japan on Friday 28th September, I wanted to buy a bunch of last minute gifts for people here in the UK. One of the reasons for this was that I could then take them as carry-on instead of adding them to hold luggage where they’d be pushed to fit in my incredibly overweight bags (got heavily stung for excess baggage)
and would be prone to destruction by baggage handling trolls. (more…)

Addictive (but relatively short) online game. Wonderfully simple idea with nice execution. Having spotted this a few days ago I spent (wasted?) four hours or so completing all 33 levels.

Yesterday I introduced my friend Trevor Knudsen, an American living in Japan, to the Carry On movies. He’d never even heard of them. Well, I’m not a fan of them all, but I do think the specific parody ones (Spying, Cleo, Screaming, Follow that Camel, Don’t Lose Your Head, Up the Khyber) remain very funny. So, Trevor and I watched Screaming, Cleo and Spying yesterday. It’s been a while since I watched Spying and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good a parody of the early Bond movies it was, and how well it stands the test of time. Carry on Screaming, however, remains my favourite of these movies, although Cleo has my favourite line (Infamy…).

Someone just linked to the Lolthulhu site from User Friendly comment board. I’d not come across this one before. Great fun.

my response is to wonder “What would Cthulhu do?”. This always gives an easy answer to the dilemma, because the answer is almost always “eat their heads”. Works in just about any situation. Particularly when faced with people like these.
Campus Crusade for Cthulhu: Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?