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My flight back to the UK will be on Friday 28th September. I’ll be at a hotel at Narita for the Thursday night (only just over a week away now). I’ve officially started to move home now, in that I’ve been packing up boxes of books for shipping back. I’ve got three boxes of books packed, with another box ready, which should take the remainder of the ones I want to ship. I’ll keep a few out of the boxes and bring them back in my luggage – reading material for between now and the flight and for the flight itself.

It’s been a wonderful adventure, which I don’t really want to end, but time marches on etc. etc. etc. This particular journey is just about at an end. More later maybe about how I feel about this sojourn, but in two words: productive, enjoyable.

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?

For those of you coming to Worldcon, here’s the list of panels that I’m scheduled to be on.

Sat 1000 The Inevtiable Google Panel
Participants: Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Eileen GUNN, Tom GALLOWAY, Adam RAKUNAS
Love it or hate it, more than half of all net users search via Google. Is it really the end all and be all of all human knowledge? Computer knowledge? Our panelists have fun and try to predict where it will be in 2 year? 10 20? 100?

Fri 1400 The Transparent Society
Participants: Charles STROSS, Chris COOPER, David BRIN, Dr Andrew A ADAMS
David Brin wrote “The Transparent society”. In it he claims that current information technology kills privacy and that we must all adjust. Related concepts are scattered through his fiction. Is it possible to put social and legal limits on the processing of private information, now and in the future?

Sat 1600 Sex and Technology
Participants: David D LEVINE, Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Patricia MACEWEN
The automobile…..the movie……the Internet……then? How has modern technology affected sex? What lies ahead – virtual reality harems? Computer-enhanced marital aids? The orgasmatron? What can we look forward to? (and is this all a Good Thing?)

BBC Radio has been having “severe technical difficulties” with their radio streaming over the internet for a couple of weeks now. This has been very disappointing because I’m used to listening to quite a few shows in the course of the week. I often listen to Today in Parliament (now off-air for the summer recess anyway) and the midnight news in the morning – the time difference means they’re fairly fresh when I get up. I also always listened to the News Quiz or the Now Show on Saturday, often following that with Any Questions.

But for the last two weeks, I’ve had to hunt around for stuff. The Now Show I’ve missed for two weeks; Thinking Allowed I missed one of, and many days I couldn’t get the Midnight News and had to go for the World Tonight or even PM.

It’s slowly getting a bit better, but there’s no way to catch up on what I’ve missed such as the Now Show. Sigh.

Potentially spoilers below.

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Mid-June to mid-July is (usually) the hot rainy season known as tsuyu. This year it’s lingering on and on. It would normally be over by now, but it looks like the tail end typhoon that came through two weeks ago disrupted the weather. It’s right at the end of July now (where’s the year gone?) and we started the day with a thunderstorm and now we’re ending it with another one.

Outside my window today I saw a young woman with a small child getting on a scooter – the motorised kind that is. It’s difficult to judge kids’ ages, particularly when the Japanese are smaller in stature than Westerners, but I’d estimate the kid was no older than 8 at the most, and probably slightly younger. Now, OK, she had a seat that had obviously been adapted for a child pillion that had an across the lap belt, and the kid was wearing a crash helmet, but I am still not sure about the safety of this (the kid was wearing long shorts and a t-shirt for example).

Any of the bikers (e.g. Sparks and Liam) got any comments on this? Would this be legal in the UK? Would you do it even if it was legal?

While looking at hotels in Nagoya today I spotted one that reminds me of home (back on Merseyside where I’m originally from, not Reading). There is a hotel in Nagoya that on a map of hotels there is called the “Nagoya Liverty Tower Hotel”. I wonder if it has Liver Birds on the top?

A lovely way to bring home to smokers the destructive nature of their habit: flickr picture link.