Course, knowledge and ignorance.

This last week I've been on a two day first aid course specialising in outdoors first aid. It ends up covering all of the Appointed Person standard but there are differences. For example, the current thing is that after checking for Danger, Response, (shout for help) Airway, Check for breathing, you then go for help. In the situations we're looking at help may be 4 or more hours away so we have to adjust things slightly.
On Thursday I went (through the snow) so the first lecture for the local Advanced Motoring group and realised I've forgotten LOTS since Yorkshire and got into far too many bad habits. We had the first observed drive today and the local group seem to do things slightly differently so the previous ones, but there are certain things that are common. I'll be adding to the Student Room AD thread to cover some of the things I've picked up.
Today the six nations starts (WOOHOO!) and there's a double bill of Firefly on Sci Fi as well (Double WOOHOO!). Following a link I came upon Rock, Paper, Cynic, and in particular, this comic. Lots of the comics made me laugh, some made me think, that one did both.
And finally, following another link, a way to see minimalist Flickr photo streams, type the browser address ihardlyknowher.com/mountainmetman or replace the last with the Flickr name of who ever's stream you want to see. Or your user name, whatever's good.

Sunday morning grin

Just had to share this one from UserFriendly.org.
I may well put up something about how ill informed (trying not to say stupid there) the worries of strangelets and rogue black holes are, but right now I'll let it slide.

Aside from that, it's a Sunday morning and while I'd rather be asleep for another couple of hours various doorbells rang earlier, none of them mine. But it's still a lie in from my normal 5 am wake up (or start to wake up). With me being such a morning person, it's probably a good thing that no one sees me until almost an hour later...
Well, time for the Lie In on Radio 1, probably the best two hours they do.

Painfully true

I was thinking about Twitter, I mean Obama, Neil Gaiman and Schlock use it, but I think Ctrl+Alt+Del has hit the nail on the head for me. Okay, Mr Obama only updated until he won, and that does somewhat reek of plugging into the zeitgeist, but none the less...
Also on the "painfully true" side of life, we've been receiving some odd faxes at work, a pressure and a correction (getting the value that you read corrected to sea level) on a blank bit of paper. We thought it was from Garvie range as we were expecting observations from them, faxed across every hour. I had a thought, prompted by Dilbert, and yes, the guys at range head had been faxing the observations the wrong way round on the fax.

On a different note, one of the blogs I follow has had some brilliant posts recently, Amanda Bauer's AstroPixie blog had this to say. And I can't top that really.

Well, almost.
Head over to Schlock Mercenary soon (especially if you are eligible to vote in the Hugo Awards!), Howard Taylor has put up a pdf of a Schlock book up for consideration for a category in the Hugos and we lucky people can benefit from his largess by getting our grubby mitts on a book of comics in handy pdf format.
If that's not cool then I don't know cool. Now please excuse me while I listen to Mantovani and crochet a cardigan in beige!
Or, as it's Wednesday, check out Girl Genius, xkcd, Penny Arcade and Kimono's Townhouse.

Links, 2,3,4

Okay, not a Rammstein related blog (although I have been snowboarding to the strains of Mein Herz Brennt of late) and I know I owe you all a catch up post (I've drafted a couple that I will put most of up before I head a bit south) but for now I'll just stick up a few links that I think you might enjoy.
The first is an optical illusion,
http://blogoscoped.com/files/stripes.html
which is just sooooo cool! Swiral might want to take care, the image appears to flicker a bit when used but I don't think it's a problem.
Next is the Boston Globe's Hubble Space Telescope advent calendar, which I hope will be up after Christmas.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/hubble_space_telescope_advent.html
Worth checking out just for the first animated image!
Next, still with the Boston Globe, is the firs part of their images of the year.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_year_2008_in_photographs_p.html
This is part of the Big Picture series (stick it on your feed reader, it's worth it!) and the photos range from the sublime to the astonishing to the disturbing to the gut wrenching and graphic.
Now for a collection of sceptical thinking blogs:
Bad Astronomy - Phil Plait's Science and Sceptical blog (and lots of Dr Who stuff).
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre's Blog, including his articles on critical thinking from the Guardian and lots about health scares and misuse of statistics.
Bad Martial Arts - martial arts without mystical explanations.
Finally, another webcomic:
http://dooomcat.com/wp/
Bear Nuts. If anyone remembers my Bondage Bear, it's kind of like that; care bears gone bad...

At work we've been trading maths jokes, including the "classic" one:
There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary, and those that don't.
And another one:


How is Hallowe'en the same as Christmas?



Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

Sorry, even I found that one a bit bad.

When I finally catch up I'll tell you about the skid pan training, the snow boarding and the bed.
Not related stories, although that would be a good one!

More geeky than c:/Spot/Run

I'll have a full post up soon but until then there is a great "cartoon-off" between the New Yorker and Randall Munroe of XKCD which includes this picture:

If I say that most geeks wouldn't get the joke you might get the idea of how geeky this is, but I laughed lots. The joke relies on a property of higher dimensions and string theory, although the New Yorker was also right about String theory...

In case anyone is wondering, the joke I mention in the title goes:
c:/
c:/Spot
c:/Spot/Run
Run/Spot/Run

I'll soon have photos of what I've been up to the last couple of weeks, it's been brilliant!

RCSI restarts Friday!!!!!

So, on Friday, the non-subscribers section of RCSI - Code Name: Hunter restarts. Darc and Matt Sowers (the writers and artist) put the comic on hiatus for half a year to get a buffer sorted and a few other things.
Main point, from Friday, and hopefully updating Monday, Wednesday and Friday after that, check out http://www.rcsitravel.net/ for a great read.
I know, I read a lot of webcomics but I've got a lot of time at work and some of the writing and artwork is brilliant.

New Webcomic

Been sent to another webcomic, xkcd, which isn't always clean, and sometimes most people won't get the jokes (knowing about computer languages, physics and maths helps) but there are some wonderful bits about getting your heart broken that I think almost everyone will understand.
My favourites so far are pages 137, 154, 128, 123, 112, 92, 90(!), 10, 13, 21 (google Kepler laws of planetary orbit), 36, 40, 45, 52, 54, 55, 59, 67 (nerd girls rock!), 68, 75, 77, 78, 83, 84, 88, 164 (politics), 169, 171, 179 (geek alert, I laughed out loud.), 184, 197, 207 (makes me think of Pippa in the last panel), 209, 229, 231, 236, 241 (if you don’t get it, read Ender’s Game, brilliant book), 242, 249, 250, 253, 256, 258 (oh so true), 273 (some sick stuff there), 275, 277 (another one for the engineers), 281 (been there, had a package marked as "left Aberdeen" and arrived six hours later. It’s 60 miles people! Arggh.), 282, 283, 288, 289, 291, 295 (DNE – do not erase), 296 (look for the hover over text), 300, 302, 304 and 305.
Don't forget to hover the mouse over the image for the hidden text, often an extra joke.

XKCD

Another web comic has come to my attention, from a number of sources,
www.xkcd.com

It's not always safe for work and many of the jokes aren't funny unless you know quite a bit about physics/computers/other specialised subjects. Quite a bit of "bad" language, but always justified. My favourites so far are:

pages 137, 154, 128, 123, 112, 92, 90(!), 10, 13, 21 (google Kepler laws of planetary orbit), 36, 40, 45, 52, 54, 55, 59, 67 (nerd girls rock!), 68, 75, 77, 78, 83, 84, 88, 164 (politics), 169, 171, 179 (geek alert, I laughed out loud.), 184, 197, 207 (makes me think of Pippa in the last panel), 209, 229, 231, 236, 241 (if you don’t get it, read Ender’s Game, brilliant book), 242, 249, 250, 253, 256, 258 (oh so true), 273 (some sick stuff there), 275, 277 (another one for the engineers), 281 (been there, had a package marked as "left Aberdeen" and arrived six hours later. It’s 60 miles people! Arggh.), 282, 283, 288, 289, 291, 295 (DNE – do not erase), 296 (look for the hover over text), 300, 302, 304, 305.

Don't forget to hover the mouse over the picture to get extra text!

Webcomics and T'Interweb in general.

Please note, this is not about time wasting, it's about what to do when there isn't anything more immediately demanding on your time.
At work, especially on nights or quiet days, we have quite alot of spare time. I had been using this to do more work on my NVQ and the job folders, but those are all done now. So the problem arises, what does one do with the time?
Should I try and carry on writing the story I've been working on for about three years (not sure how far I've got in words or chapters but I'm about 30% through the story), should I take a book in to read (problem, this will increase the number of books I read, which can become costly), should I surf the net for new and unusual things to do or should I take up the OU where I left off and try and improve myself. Or I could do something for the office.
Aside - here's one for you, the office has a whole PR and marketing department (not counting brand managers ;) ), whose job is to market the office to wider world. I mentioned to them that the Wikipedia page about the office is frankly pants and did they think it was worth improving, seeing how invasive the Wiki is these days. Their response was to invite me to write the article for them to have a look at. Now given that I'm almost complaining of having too much spare time on some shifts this may well seem fair but my point is that this is their job, they can get to all of the office, all of the little specialties, whereas I'm a forecaster in the north. In the outfield. One of those not too pleased with some recent events. Meh, aside ends here.
I would do the OU but there are enough other things on the horizon at the moment that would cause problems with that, so it's down to the internet!
I won't say I was there from the start with the net, in fact it was 97 before I saw my first web page, but we did use it alot at uni, so I was amongst the early adopters, but there's SO much of it. I've even edited pages on Wikipedia. I think I may have added some pages but I can't remember.
So to fill my free time, I was directed to the Order of the Stick (OOTS), and from there to the many wonderful worlds of web comics. WooHoo, goodbye spare time!!
Particular favourites are Gone with the Blastwave, Schlock Mercenary, Girl Genius, Flipside and Inverloch, but OOTS remains my favourite. If you've ever played any role play games (not that sort Beth!) you'll love it.
What worries me most about the comics, aside from the fact I get far too many of the jokes (I've only done one RPG that I can remember) is how often the characters remind me of my friends, from Captain Tagon in Schlock (scarily like Andi in looks and occasional directed violence - usually in my direction, but nothing like in intellect or current employment) to most of the cast of Girl Genius, I can relate to most of the players. What worries me is where I'll end up fitting in. Hoping for Kevyn, more likely somewhere between Durkon and Belkar.
One of the things I like about the wonderful worlds that people produce is that, okay, not all of them are brilliant, but someone's made the effort to create a story, and there are many, many of them out there.
Shifts just got shorter. Hurrah!