I often dream of trains

It's top weather out. (And I have been using 'top' in that sense since 1989 for which you can blame the NME. Sorted, etc.)

... And I'm mithering inside since I've not eaten properly since Wednesday and it's safest for all concerned if I'm within bolting range of a bog. Lovely.

For MOT-related reasons, I'm bobbling about in a different 9000 while mine is being fettled by Justyn-who-does-SAABs (and who was pleased to tell me that he'd just bought a mint 9-5 Carlsson for 700 notes. The complete rotter).

It's a CS with the blower set to 'hooligan' and it is very silly indeed.

(Un)fortunately, I am forced to drive it for a few more days because the poor sod managed to crack the sump on mine...

On the other hand, the Youtubes has worked what I'm like (or at least what one facet is like) and keeps presenting me with DieselPr0n. Yes I would like some footage of a Bristol Hercules and/or a 60-litre V12 Paxman diesel. Although I have to say that I've been closer to that one than the camera-person (It is going to be a bloke though, isn't it.) and it's much more impressive when you're nose-to-injector with the thing.

Because of, oh I don't know, learned idleness, shit life and record-player hidden under pile of crap (and needing its belt changed I suspect), of late it's been easier to have the internet deliver terrible skronking noises direct to what passes for my scrot-o-pod (It's actually a phone) so I can hoot my trap off in the privacy and comfort of my own vile emanations.

Thus it is pre-packaged soundproduct(tm) individually tailored to my personal wants and needs. (Actually, Belbury Poly, Y Niwl, Sevs and Horace Silver)

In the old days, before I accepted the notion of the CD into my life, the thought of piecing together a discography from the jigsaw of Peel programmes, record fairs, the gaps in indie label catalogue numbers and small ads in the NME was a jolly one. A kind of scruffy-guitar codebreaking and psycho-cartography at the same time.

Psycho-cartography. Unconscious maps, hacks and hidden levels. (Which is why the 'UK entrances to hell' site is so fascinating) Post-industrial priest holes. The hidden seams and fault-lines in the built landscape.

Um. Anyway.

So you may imagine the irony in discovering a band (Factory Floor, who make the sort of racket I would have liked to have made myself some two decades ago, only I'd have more guitar in the Albini style) who've released mostly vinyl on a random selection of labels. Some of it's available via the Amazon MP3 shop, but quite frankly Jeff B doesn't need my money. The interesting stuff appears to only be available on the modern equivalent of Factory Benelux. In the old days, that would just be an excuse to go and pester Roger Driftin'. Now? Look, I know what's going to happen if I end up in Rise Music and it's going to be expensive.

Mind, I never did get the thing about buying comics and could only be arsed with Trades.

Following on from the throwaway sentence about what people would really do with time-travel...

... The obvious next question is 'What are the intersections of time-travel and Rule 34?'

(I have no bloody idea, myself. Apart from the relatively obvious RAH short.)

Everyone knows about foo and bar. (or my $foo, int foo...) Probably because if you've the sort of mind described in the back of 'The new hacker's dictionary', you'll already have absorbed part of that culture without really knowing why. I had a similar-but-different experience while reading a weblog the other day. Salutory stuff.

Anyway. There are others - fred, bill, wibble, x, n.

If you come across integers or random indexes/counters that always seem to be i, j and k, you can tell that there's a dollop of ancestral FORTRAN somewhere in that code's gene pool.

I tend to use $thing and $otherthing. Actually, tended now that Perl has become an Orwellian un-language.

And of late I have been using 'blah' a lot. I had thought it had arrived randomly because it's quick to type like 'fred', but actually I now remember it was the favoured meta-variable of one of the hackers at Orchestream.

So there you go.

This is Eben Upton explaining why he/they created the Raspberry Pi.

What I'd not realised is that the number of people in the spod trades who're actually, y'know, any bloody use at all has dropped like a rock.

I guess this is quite handy in re. my continued employment because there aren't any hungry young graduates who can do it better and cheaper.

Weird. Maybe I'm about to be a lamp-lighter or buggy-whip maker?

Sometimes when the people on the television want to you pay special attention to words because they think they are scientific or futuristic, they will make them appear slowly from left to right accompanied by a squelchy chattering noise like someone scraping TO220-packaged transistors down a sheet of galvanised steel.

Transistors? They were the things that made HH 100W combos sound post-punk and collectivist.

Post-punk? That was the soundtrack the day industry decided to stop.