Purple Hair! (by sarah)

I have dyed my hair purple black!

The hair was still slightly wet when I took these so I'm hoping they will look more purple than this!

Science Budget Cut by 600 Million (by sarah)

I follow New Scientist for the little snippets of news even though I decided I had to stop my subscription. And yesturday the thing that stuck out at me was the proposed Science Budget cut of 600 Million - they can't be serious - please tell me they are joking.

But they are not - in fact I am seeing reports now of 68, 000 🙁

And so this country will sink due to arttrition - with out science research our international standing will falter. With cuts that mean students will not be supported as well - 5-10 years down the line shortages will begin to appear in medical research, in defence, in Industry, in the infurstructor of the country that keeps buildings up and the like.

It will have knock on effects in medical care, food production and believe it or not business and the economy - you will be wiping out the innovationalists. They will have no way to foster their brains or their ideas.

And so the Uk will crumble and become a pantry backwater living off of the tourism of a by gone age.

We will also have an unemployment problem - a bunch of over qualified people competeting for the same jobs everyone else is trying to get - suicide rates will go up. Intellegent crimes like frued will go up. Unrest and dissent.

I look around and I see other things coming into being like the idea that ISP should spy on their customers to check what they are looking at - this is the UK and not China I am talking about here - look.

I am starting to feel we are in a slow under cover war against those people who actually think! The inventors and innovators, anybody who thinks - and the scary bit about this is if you get rid of those people who is going to stick up for those too scared or too busy looking after families or those who just don't have the mental campacity?

Such as the situation with this kiddy database where they ask lots of questions about what you eat when and if your scared to be with your perants etc.... (this is for like five year olds so the parent has to fill it in :/) it was not obvious it wasn't compulsary and when asked some of the parents had been scared that non compliance would have their children put on some list and taken away. This is not a good state of affairs 🙁

And what has this latest fiasco shown me? It's shown me that the government is going to break even their most arduant promises and that I can not trust a single thing they do or say.

Angel Jean (by sarah)

Friday Jean came home with a letter saying her costume needed to be in school by Monday - I had obviously missed a letter somewhere a long the line and didn't even know what she was supposed to be. She informed me that she was an angel and that she had to have silver wings.

So one Sunday afternoon, gaffa tape, cardboard and a trip to tesco's for some tinsel and we had a pair of angel wings complete with a mechanism for attaching them to her without pain!

If I ever get around to writing this up the instructions and step by step photos will go on Salaric Craft. The angel dress was a rehash of last years snow cloud costume.

The Art of Knowledge Unconference (by sarah)

This weekend 12-13 Dec 2009 in Bristol there is an Unconference part of the uncraftivism weekend and I am going to be reading some of my poems that I think appropriate! Like The Programmer's Lament and A Picture of Words.

Me and Alaric are hoping some of you will join us in Bristol 🙂

It looks like a really interesting event so I'm looking forward to it - lots!

BKU2009 on twitter and I think there's some online jabbery stuff occuring. There is also like a talk/culture cafe thing and a lot of free form stuff hence the Un- bit of conference!

On being oddly dressed (by alaric)

Last Friday, I stood up in front of a hundred or so people and gave a five-minute talk on some software I've spent two years of my life writing. However, I wasn't particularly self-conscious about the fact that I was oddly dressed.

For me, clothes are about:

1. Keeping me warm
2. Carrying my stuff

It's not that their appearance doesn't matter to me - I don't want to be wearing shabby or tatty clothes. I don't want to wear garish bright colours. I like my clothes to more or less match, so I tend to choose solid dark colours when I buy myself clothes, as they're easy to look smart in.

But every now and then I get a comment from somebody that I must be a bit weird to go around wearing a podbelt and an assault vest... and when the weather's bad, I got outside in a full-length heavy cloak. Luckily, saying that sort of thing disqualifies people from me being too interested in their opinions, so it doesn't particularly bother me.

I like carrying lots of stuff with me. I'm equipped for every eventuality. When people get things in their eyes, I'm there with a mirror and tweezers. I have the obligatory geek multi-tool, of course. My first-aid kit has brought comfort to many a cut finger. My little lengths of string have jerry-rigged many a repair. I always have a torch, a compass, a pen, a notepad, a monocular, and a laser pointer to hand; so I can navigate, find things in the dark, read small text on a projector from the back of the room (and then point to the thing I'm asking about with the laser). If a button comes off of something, I sit down, take out my sewing kit, and fix it. In my laptop bag is a pouch full of cables and adapters, which has saved the day on many a late-night data-centre emergency. When it's raining so hard that people are cowering in shop doorways, my cloak keeps me dry; at the conference on Friday, when there were no seats left, it folded up tightly and became a low stool so I could sit comfortably. A week or so ago, when I was driving home from London very late one night and became too tired to continue, I pulled into a dark lay-by and slept underneath it, warm and comfortable even when the temperature plummeted before dawn.

I'm not just hoarding gadgets for the sake of it - I do assess the trade-offs of every extra bit of weight to carry around. Weight in the podbelt isn't an issue as it carries very nicely on my hips, I barely notice the weight of it, but space there is at a premium. Weight in the assault vest is more of an issue, since it pulls at my shoulders. I've tried having just a podbelt, but it's not good to wear while sitting down, so I tended to take it off and sling it over the back of the chair, which makes things harder to get at; and I've tried just having an assault vest, but weight was a problem. The current combination means I can keep lightweight things I often need while sitting down (mobile phone, pens, pads, business cards, laser pointer, etc) on me all the time, while weightier things I tend to need more on the move (keys, wallet, tools, first aid gear) in the podbelt. I have optional extra things I add for specific "missions" that I wouldn't want to carry all the time, too - I have a special tool jacket with loops for screwdrivers and the like which I wear if I'm doing DIY in awkward locations, an extra assault vest with more specialist stuff for when I'm busy being a Cub leader, a black lightweight mesh one with large pockets for hiking (the large pockets accept good quantities of food, GPSes, and the like), a water flask that goes on the podbelt, and a spare podbelt pouch that I'm going to assemble a survival kit in: emergency rations, a survival blanket, that sort of thing.

When I've explained this to people who question the amount of stuff I carry, they say "But what are the odds of all these things happening?". But they happen all the time! So I'm happy being prepared for anything... it makes life a lot less stressful. My clothes and their pockets become an extension of my body; we are, after all, all cyborgs.