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Long Time No See
18 Hours Ago

Apparently, I haven't posted since mid-October.

In a week, I fly to The Gambia, and when I return there will be a Mrs B as well. In principle, this wouldn't take much to organise (get to Gambia, appear on appointed day) but in reality I'm acting as travel agent, tour guide and nonsense-answerer for everyone that's going out there. Today, thanks to a hell of a lot of hard work on my part, I finally have the vaguest idea what's going on. It's amazing how a 'simple idea' can be so much damn work.

Have a great Christmas, all, and hopefully I'll catch up with you around February.

(8 replies, Latest reply: 6 Hours Ago)

Women
4 Weeks Ago

Well done. You win.

Lainey's off on her hen do this weekend. I have the place to myself. ALL weekend. Woo!

Except I have nothing to do. I can't make her a cup of tea when she wakes up, nor one when she gets home from work. I'm eating out (curry) all weekend, at least in part because there isn't any point in coooking anything nice if your lover isn't there to enjoy it.

My cousins met up with me for a curry tonight, and we all agree that the world wouild fall apart without women. We'd be ok with our pubs and stuff for a few days, but would soon fall into an apathetic state brought on by Sky Sports News, comfortable sofas and lager. I don't see how we'd cope.

The flat feels weirdly empty. I'm used to there being two people here. One may be asleep on the sofa or off to bed already, but there's two of us. It feels lonely right now.

(13 replies, Latest reply: 4 Weeks Ago)

In Defence of Science
Nov 10, 2009

I've just been watching QI XL, for my sins, and there was a little bit about the Gomboc on there. A Gomboc is a little self-righting device - whichever way you start it, it will end up resting on the same point - and it is unique in the world.

I thought this was rather clever and quite good fun, until one of the panel asked its inventor 'so what purpose does this serve?' with a sneering look.

Why is it only science that seems to have the obligation to serve society's needs? Is every work of art, every sculpture and painting, every song and symphony, every film and TV programme, created to serve the greater good rather than a cultural need? Or do they further society in an entirely seperate way to science, which needs to justify every step forward by demonstrating our lives will be richly improved as a result of every morsel we learn?

White-coated boffins messing about with test tubes and contradicting one another with messy, complicated explanations of things that have absolutely no value to anyone anyway. Right?

(11 replies, Latest reply: Nov 11, 2009)

Retirement
Nov 9, 2009

After 18 months, I've decided to retire as Post editor with immediate effect.

Since the summer break, I've struggled to get back into the groove and found that editing has increasingly become a chore rather than a pleasure. That isn't a good attitude for an editor to have, obviously. I'd have liked to have gone through to the ten year anniversary issue or Christmas before calling it a day, because there were a couple of ideas that I wanted to see through, and I was still enjoying my work (if not as much as I used to).

Today, two of Lainey's colleagues were involved in a very serious car crash. Neither will ever recover fully, if at all - they're both in intensive care. They are both in their twenties. I have never met either of them and Lainey barely knows them so we're not affected personally, but it was enough of a shock for me to take stock. Saying goodbye to The Post was a big deal, but the time is right now for me to go.

Knee-jerk? Maybe. But it's a knee-jerk that's been about to happen for a while now.

I've thoroughly enjoyed my time at The Post, and I'm really grateful to Shazz and EMR in particular for giving me the chance to be involved. And good luck to Bel and the rest of the team for the future. It's been a blast.

(16 replies, Latest reply: Nov 10, 2009)

index, follow
Oct 19, 2009

This is going to be quite a dull bit of news for most people, but I've just noticed that the robots tag on all h2g2 pages now says '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">'.

This, in theory, means that we should get nudged rather higher in search results, as the whole site is indexed and all the internal links between Entries come in to play. And, as conversation forums will be indexed by Google from now on, we're going to get conversation threads starting to appear in Google searches much more frequently.

I wonder if this is the first step in getting the search facility fixed/improved? If not, it will be a hell of a lot easier to design a custom Google search box that works.

(33 replies, Latest reply: Oct 24, 2009)