Psychonaut's Journal

I have started a new blog chronicling my project to produce a complete digital archive of the Socialist Standard, the official journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain which has been published without interruption since 1904. There probably won't be anything political in the blog; it deals more with the technical and practical challenges of digitizing a sizeable newspaper corpus. You may want to read the blog if you are interested in things such as batch image manipulation, OCR, indexing, document archiving, digital publishing, and how to do most or all of the preceding with Free Software.

So, without further ado, I present the Socialist Standard Digitization Blog.

Back in April and September I

posted on the size of my inbox and my scheme for depleting its contents. The idea was to plot a graph showing the number of messages in my inbox each day, thus encouraging me to direct the plot towards

Well, after nearly a year, I am pleased to report that I have finally reached my goal of an empty inbox! As much as I would have liked to simply do a Ctrl+A Del, I did make sure to read, act upon, and if necessary respond to all the messages that had been languishing there, in some cases for several years. According to the plot below, I started really putting a dent in the pile beginning in July, and (in fits and starts) got it down to a manageable level by the end of December. Since then I've maintained reasonable e-mail hygiene, keeping my inbox below about 30 e-mails. It was only today, however, that I was finally able to clear it out completely.

I hope this lasts! Nobody send me any e-mail for a while, please. I want to sit here and relish the blank screen for at least a few minutes. :)

Does anyone else get crazy letters from random strangers in the

post? I've been getting them every few years since 1997. Always from different people. I have no idea how these people get my address (the phone book, maybe?) or why they think that writing to me about their ideas is going to do any good. Anyway, here's the latest screed, which arrived last week—in a very fancy and expensive envelope, I might add. (If the text is too small for you to read, follow the link for a larger version.) I particularly like how he labelled his post code as such, in case I wouldn't be able to figure

Does anyone here still read Usenet? One of my favourite newsgroups

is talk.origins, which is dedicated to discussion of evolution and creationism. As you might expect, the group attracts some pretty strange characters. My favourite is Ray Martinez, a self-described "Old Earth Young Biosphere Protestant Evangelical Paulinist". Ray is a disciple of late televangelist Gene Scott, and has been entertaining talk.origins denizens for the better part of a decade with his obstinate creationist rants. Among his more bizarre claims are that the Great Pyramid is an ultrascientific monument designed by God to encase Biblical claims, and that the existence of Atlantis in the Antlantic Ocean is proven by the fact that eels return there to spawn. Ray's ideas about creationism and evolution are so kooky that he was even kicked off Conservapedia, of all

As a linguist, I find Ray's use of language particularly hilarious; people will attempt to enter into a rational discussion with him only to find that he has completely idiosyncratic definitions of ordinary English words. Some years ago I collected some of the best in a post titled "A Ray Martinez Dictionary" (also available on Google Groups). The linguistic madness has continued in the years following that post; Ray has recently entered into several protracted arguments that the meaning of the prefix a-, of Greek origin, is "in opposition to" and never "without". Absolutely no number of literary (even Biblical) examples or dictionary citations can possibly convince him otherwise; his definition comes straight from Gene Scott, who is the final authority on all matters linguistic (and scientific, and historical, and theological, and…).

Recently a Hindu creationist has appeared in the group, which makes a nice diversion from the usual complement of Christians. Yesterday he started a new thread about whether life begins at conception. Apparently he believes in something akin to the homonculus theory of conception, wherein a sperm is envisaged as a fully-formed but miniature man which installs itself in a woman's womb and grows there. People tried to explain to him that sperm are not sentient, and that both the mother and father contribute DNA to the child; his responses aroused suspicions as to whether he actually understood what the term "DNA" even meant. So someone asked him flat out if he actually knew what DNA was, which garnered the following hilarious response from him:

DNA is what I assume is the Object of the Class Definition from the Parent Class.

The definition of the class of the human is pre-defined in male and female humans, and there are modifications and updates to this class library from time to time. This make every new born that is the object of the class definition different from the every other humans born.

I guess this guy's entire knowledge of genetics comes from Biology 101 for C++ Programmers.

OK, so it's been almost a year since I last wrote about our ongoing

harassment by some company called "TV Licensing", and in that time we've continued to get spam and/or unsolicited visits every few weeks. I therefore decided to see if withdrawing their common-law implied

Santander call centre agent: Hello, welcome to Santander. May I please take

your name?

[here occurs about three patience-testing minutes of identification checks and quality control questions]

Me: I already have a Santander First Home Saver account with you, and now I would like to open a Santander Bank Account. Can I do that over the phone or do I have to go to a branch?

Santander call centre agent: It's no problem; you can do that with me. Just a moment, please.

[three minutes of being on hold for no given reason]

Thank you for holding, Mr. Miller. You said you currently have a savings account with us?

Me: Yes.

Santander call centre agent: And do you have a bank account?

Me: Yes, but not with Santander. I'd like to open one of your Santander Bank Account current accounts—the ones with 6% interest.

Santander call centre agent: Fine, Mr. Miller. First I need to ask you some questions to help determine which of our products and services are best suited to your needs.

Me: There's no need for that; I know which product I want. I want the Santander Bank Account.

Santander call centre agent: But it's necessary to answer a few questions so that we can find out which…

Me: I don't need to pick from a list of your accounts. I already know exactly which one I want.

Santander call centre agent: It's not a list, Mr. Miller. We just need to ask you a few questions to find out which of our products best match your needs.

Me: Can't we just skip that?

Santander call centre agent: I'm sorry, but this step is compulsory. We can't proceed with this call otherwise.

Me: Well, then, I guess this call is at an end. Goodbye.

Santander call centre agent: Goodbye, Mr. Miller.

Frettchen's vet called today with the results of the lab test done on the mysterious growth removed from her leg. It turns out it was a sebaceous adenoma, a type of benign tumor. The vet assured me that they had removed all of it and that it would not regrow.

A couple weeks ago I ordered some T-shirts from an American

retailer. Today in the mail I got the following letter indicating that the package was being held for ransom by a company called Parcelforce pending payment of

The £11.10 VAT charge seemed fair enough, since it's a customs fee charged by the government on importation of certain goods. But, thought I, what was this £8.00 "Parcelforce Clearance Fee" and why on earth should I pay it?

I did some Googling and it turns out that (a) Parcelforce is just a trading name of the Royal Mail, and (b) I'm not the only one skeptical about this £8 "clearance fee", which is a separate handling fee charged by Parcelforce and not by HM Revenue & Customs. In fact, many people and consumer groups such as Postwatch (now Consumer Focus), believe that this fee is or may be illegal under the terms of the Postal Services Act. See, for example, these discussions on the MoneySavingExpert.com, Consumer Action Group, and moneysupermarket.com forums. Several people have reported success in having the fee waived, abandoned, or reclaimed via an expedited small claims court process. At least one of them had some success calling the police when Parcelforce refused to release his package.

With this knowledge, I decided I wouldn't be paying the fee. I called the number on the invoice and told the operator that I wished to pay the VAT but not the Clearance Fee. She told me that that wasn't possible because the Parcelforce Clearance Fee is charged by HM Revenue & Customs, not Parcelforce, a rather bald-faced lie which I called her on immediately. She said that she couldn't help me any further and that I would have to speak to a manager in person at the depot.

Since the depot wasn't too far away, and since I wanted the package right away, I hopped on a bus, armed with the relevant sections of the Postal Services Act, a copy of a letter from an official at HM Revenue & Customs confirming that they had nothing to do with the Clearance Fee, and the number of the local police station. Yep, I was not going to pay that fee, and was ready to fight!

When I got to the Parcelforce depot, the first thing I noticed was a tray full of leaflets about the Clearance Fee. Clearly I was not the first person to have come into the depot intending to dispute it.

Interestingly, this leaflet cites as proof that their fee is legal the very same Act which I believe proves it to be illegal. I won't go into a detailed refutation, as I'm not a lawyer, but suffice it to say that our interpretations of the law differ: they say §89 of the Act lets them charge a fee, but I say §§83 and 84 prohibits it. I decided to press on.

I walked up to the service window, presented the invoice, asked to collect my parcel, and politely said that I wanted to pay the customs fee but not the Parcelforce Clearance Fee. The woman said that I had to pay both fees before they could release the parcel, and I said, again very politely, that I didn't think it was legal for them to use nonpayment of some private handling fee as a pretext for holding my package. "Just a minute," said the woman, and disappeared around back. I was sure that she was going to fetch a supervisor to argue with me.

But no! She came back with my package, told me, "That will be £11.10, please," took my money, and handed me my package. I asked for a receipt, and she handed me back my invoice with a big "PAID" stamp on it. She didn't make any further argument or mention of the Clearance Fee.

I would like to think that Parcelforce's immediate and quiet refusal to pursue the matter can be taken as evidence that they know their fee is illegal. At any rate, simply refusing to pay the fee upon collection worked for me, and so I'd advise anyone else receiving a similar notice to do likewise. Providing you're not far from the depot where your package is being held, this is almost certainly less costly, in terms of time and money, than pursuing a small claims case against the company.

Frettchen has survived her operation. As usual, she has been left with an ugly bald patch and stitches. The vet still has no idea what it is they removed from her leg—they've sent it to the lab for analysis. Will post more as the story develops…

From 4 to 11 January I took a holiday in Iceland with

Giusi and Imke, my classmates from Icelandic class. We were expecting a lovely winter holiday with lots of cold and snow. However, there was no snowfall at all, and even the meagre amount on the ground was washed away in a couple days by the rain and unusually warm temperatures (up to 7 ℃). Meanwhile back in home Britain was experiencing one of the coldest spells in recent memory: temperatures were as low as −18 ℃ in some areas, with up to 35 cm of snow. This strange reversal in weather patterns was apparently caused by an

Anyway, on to the photos. You can see the complete gallery on my web page. Meanwhile here are some non-representative samples, which I have chosen only because they have a story behind them:

People in the guesthouse kept stealing our food from the refrigerator, so Giusi made this sign. Unfortunately, it didn't work very well—our food continued to disappear even after its erection. Curiously, one one occasion someone stole our cheese and then left money in its place. It was more than enough to cover the cost of the cheese, but that's little consolation when you're hungry and the nearest supermarket is a kilometre away.

The guesthouse had a TV with four local channels. Two of them were on only from 18:00 to 20:15, the third had similarly ridiculous hours, and the fourth one played nothing but fundamentalist Christian programming imported from America and subtitled in Icelandic. Now, there's only so much Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron a person can take before going insane, so we turned to the satellite: 1500 channels to choose from! Unfortunately, among them was just one English channel and two Swiss German channels; most of the rest were in Arabic, Italian, and Polish. The above-pictured Arab guy had three channels all to himself, where he broadcast the same show nearly 24 hours a day. The show consisted of him staring calmly at his laptop while callers ranted, raved, and shouted for up to half an hour at a time. The host rarely spoke or even looked up from his laptop. We suspect he was surfing the Internet for porn.

Does anyone remember (or still use) F-PROT antivirus? The headquarters of its maker, FRISK Software International, were just beside our guesthouse.

Pre- and post-consumption photos of svið, a traditional Icelandic dish of half a singed and boiled sheep's head. Apart from the cheek, there's not much meat on it—you're eating pretty much nothing but the eyeball, nose, tongue, cartilage, and skin. (Only the ear, horn, and brain are removed prior to cooking.) It tasted much better than I expected.

My first meal of the trip: on the left, svartfugl (auk) and on the right, hákarl (Greenland shark). The shark is poisonous when fresh, but can be made (barely) edible by a process of putrefaction: the gutted and beheaded shark is buried in gravel for six to twelve weeks, then dug out and hung up to dry for several months. The kind I sampled here, skyrhákarl, is cut from the body, and is soft, white, and tastes like a very strong cheese. There is another variety, glerhákarl, which I bought in a supermarket and brought back with me. It's cut from the belly and is pink and chewy; the taste is mildly fishy at first, but after a few seconds an unpleasantly strong wave of ammonia hits you.

Giusi approaches Skógafoss. This was the second waterfall we visited, after Seljalandsfoss. Normally it is possible to walk behind Seljalandsfoss, but in the winter the slippery ice makes this impossible, or at least inadvisable without crampons and other special equipment.

The site of an auto collision near our guesthouse. Giusi and I were around the corner when it happened and we came rushing to help. One of the drivers was unconscious, so I climbed into his car, shut it off, and activated the parking brake and hazard lights. Meanwhile another woman called 112 to report the accident. Despite the police station being only 300 metres away, it took them about ten minutes to arrive.

Poor Frettchen's got a new medical problem. A few weeks ago I noticed she had a small raised scab on her leg, about a couple millimetres across. It didn't seem to bother her at all, though. But then it got bigger and bigger, until it was maybe seven or eight millimetres across, so I took her to the vet. The vet had no idea what it could be—she said possibly just an injury, or a cyst, or a tumor—so we decided to leave it for another week or so to see what happened.

Well, that week I happened to be on holiday in Iceland, so Frettchen was under the care of missy3ve. A few days into the holiday I got a call from her saying that she needed to take Frettchen to the vet right away because the scab was bleeding and causing her pain. In the end missy3ve just had a telephone consultation with the vet, who advised her not to bring Frettchen in but rather keep her under close observation to make sure she didn't get any worse.

I got home from Iceland on Monday and picked Frettchen up from missy3ve's last night. A couple hours before I arrived the scab had fallen or been bitten off, revealing a gaping wound in her leg, with a convex bulge between one and two centimetres in diameter protruding from it. We called the vet straight away, and made an appointment for her to come in the next morning (today). The vet said it looked bad and booked her in for surgery right then and there, since there was no way her skin could heal over a wound that big.

So now I am ferretless—hopefully temporarily so—while Frettchen is undergoing surgery to remove the growth (whatever it is) and close the wound. Whatever they excise they're going to send to the lab to see exactly what it is. It could be a foreign body, or a cyst, or a tumor, or something else entirely.

Also, a couple months ago I looked into getting pet insurance so I wouldn't have to pay much for these sorts of incidents in the future. However, the only company I found willing to ensure ferrets, Exotic Direct, disqualified Frettchen on the grounds that she is too old. On 15 December I sent a message to the National Ferret Welfare Society for advice, and got the following response back today:

Dear psych0naut,
 
It would appear that ferret health insurance is like trying to find hens 
teeth!  The only thing I can suggest is what a lot of other animal owners do 
and that is to set up a separate savings account or ISA if you want to be 
really tax efficient and put so much aside each month then use this as and  
when it's necessary.
 
Sorry I couldn't be of more help but apart from Exotic, they're the only  
company that any-one has come across that does or did do ferret health  
insurance.
 
All the best.
 
Bennie
National Ferret Welfare Society (NFWS)

I'm having a nice winter holiday. On 31 December I saw the Johann

Strauss Gala at the Barbican with two friends from work. I had been meaning to see a live Strauss concert for some time, and this one didn't disappoint. I especially liked the customary audience

The next day it was back to the Barbican to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra UK with missy3ve. The average age of the audience must have been over 75, making me and missy3ve among the youngest concert-goers. Nonetheless it was a great night out. They played all of my favourite Glenn Miller standards, including "American Patrol", "I've Got A Girl in Kalamazoo", "Pennsylvania 6-5000", and of course "In The Mood". There were a couple of disappointments, though:

1. The concert was billed and introduced as "The Glenn Miller Orchestra", leading us to believe that it was the original one. I found out only afterwards, through reading some of the promotional material, that it was actually a separate UK orchestra.
2. Their occasional female vocalist, Jan Messeder, was absolutely awful. Her singing was breathy and off-pitch, she kept jerking her microphone out of range, and more than once huge gobs of spit flew out of her mouth and into the audience. missy3ve and I, who were in the third row, were in constant danger of being hit. Her salivatory antics were nonetheless the object of much mirth in our row, with the pair of ladies sitting next to us barely able to contain their laughter, and later, tears.

And my holiday isn't over yet! Tomorrow Giusi and I are heading off to Iceland for a week.

More sleepy Frettchen photos here

So here's the fifth and final entry (I hope) in the continuing saga

of Frettchen's ailment. (In case you need a refresher, I refer you to

Just before I went on holiday last month, my vet was able to mix up a batch of the diazoxide oral solution that Frettchen desperately needs to treat her insulinoma. ewtikins, who looked after the weasel in my absence, dutifully administered 1 mL of the suspension twice per day, and reported that it was effective at preventing her fainting spells. So now Frettchen will be on the drug for the rest of her life, which with her condition could be as long as two more years. The only problem is that the vet gave me (for free, thankfully!) enough solution to last only 50 days. The rest I would have to make myself.

So a couple weeks ago I bought some diazoxide tablets and a mortar and pestle to pulverize them. The only thing missing was the solution to dissolve the drug in. When I called the vet, all they could tell me was that it was "BP syrup" which, as any British pharmacist can tell you, doesn't refer to any particular kind of liquid, but rather any of a number of different solutions standardized by the British Pharmacopoeia. There's BP standard glucose syrup, BP standard saline syrup, BP standard ethanol syrup, and so on. Which one to use depends on the sort of medication you're dissolving, since certain drugs are soluble only in certain syrups. But all my vet would tell me is that they used "BP syrup" to make my diazoxide suspension. What's worse, the pharmacy that sold me the diazoxide couldn't find out, after a week of research, which solution was the right one to use with diazoxide.

After many frantic calls to the vet pleading for more details, each met with insistence that the only thing written on their bottle was "BP syrup", they finally agreed to sell me their remaining stock, which I picked up a couple days ago. Sure enough, it was a big plastic bottle with an official-looking label that read only "BP syrup" and no further indication of what the actual ingredient was. Judging by the taste and viscosity of it, though, I'm guessing it's propylene glycol.

So here's a little photo essay (thanks to pfy) showing how I made the solution.

The ingredients: diazoxide tablets, two brown glass medicine jars, a mortar and pestle, a measuring cup, and the mysterious ambiguously labelled suspension fluid.

First we put the diazoxide tablets into the mortar.

Next we pulverize the diazoxide tablets with the pestle.

Next we measure out some suspension fluid.

We then mix the powdered diazoxide tablets into the suspension fluid.

Here's how the final suspension looks. Whereas the diazoxide itself dissolves into the suspension, the tablet fillers are rather clumpy and fail to disperse.

Now we pour the suspension into the medicine bottles.

Ta-da! Two bottles containing diazoxide in suspension.

We now draw some diazoxide into a syringe. Frettchen seems more interested in licking the propylene glycol from the lid.

Frettchen dutifully takes her diazoxide suspension from the syringe. :)

Við leitum leigjanda til að deila indælu húsi í Leytonstone, einu

af indælustu hverfunum í Austur-London. Hérna eru upplýsingar um

• tveggja manna svefnherbergi með skáp, kommóða, fatagrind, og tvíbreiðu rúmi
• sameiginlegt eldhús og baðherbergi, sameiginleg stofa, og sameinlegur garður
• þvottavél
• miðstöðvarhitun
• þráðlaust Internet
• reyklaust heimili
• vinsamlegur leigusali
• ferðakostir:
  • Travelcard Zone 3
  • 200 metrar frá Leytonstone High Road stöð (Overground) og strætó 257, W14, og N8
  • 800 metrar frá Leytonstone stöð (Underground) og strætó 66, 145, W13, W15, W16, W19, og N55
• staðsetning:
  • 200 metrar frá búðum og veitingahúsum
  • 200 metrar frá Wanstead Flats, stórum lystigarði sem er tengdur við Epping Skóg
  • 1200 metrar frá Tesco Superstore
• tveir húsfélagar og fretta, sem eru rólegir og auðveld í sambúð
• verð: £75/viku (húsaleiga) plús um £78/mánuði (skattur og veitukerfi)

I wrote earlier about Postcrossing, an online

project where you get postcards from all around the world. I wrote in my profile that I like to get "unusual postcards", so I was quite

If you want to see the other postcards I've received, check out my postcard wall on Postcrossing.

I heard a while ago that it was possible to buy unused postage

stamps on eBay for far below their face value. Apparently they're mostly from stamp collections whose owners need the money, and who

Yesterday I decided to see for myself—sure enough, there are many lots of unused, mint-condition stamps with bids starting at just 1p and typically ending at around 75% to 85% of the lot's face value. And best of all, there are loads of lots containing various commemorative and special-issue stamps, which are much nicer to use than the boring Machins you always get at the Post Office. So I placed a bid on £69 worth of stamps and won them for £59, including shipping. They arrived in the post today—you can see them below.

I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who regularly posts letters. Just search for "unused stamps" or similar on eBay, and then use the checkboxes on the left of the results page to filter your results to the appropriate country. In the case of UK stamps, make sure they're from 1971 or later; otherwise they won't be valid. And remember to factor in the shipping cost before bidding; otherwise you might end up paying more, not less, than the stamps' face value.

You may have heard that Google is now offering use of its DNS

servers to the browsing public. Is this something that's worth using?

For those who don't know what DNS is or how it works, here's a quick and very basic rundown. Every computer connected to the Internet has an address consisting of four numbers, such as 208.113.225.82. Most computers also have a domain name, such as www.nothingisreal.com or mail.yahoo.co.uk. We usually refer to computers by their domain names rather than by their numeric addresses, because the latter are difficult to remember and can sometimes change without warning. Think of computers' domain names and addresses as the equivalent of people's names and telephone numbers.

Whenever you try to access a remote computer (such as by accessing a bookmark in your browser, or typing a URL into a location bar), your computer first connects to a DNS server which is like a big telephone directory giving the numeric address for each domain name. The DNS server tells your computer the address of the machine you're trying to reach, and then your computer uses that address to connect to the machine directly.

Now, when your computer first goes online, the Internet connection is usually automatically configured to find and use your Internet service provider's DNS server. This is good because it means you don't have to find out and type in the address of a DNS server manually; you just need to plug in your network cable and the computer takes care of the rest. On the other hand, using your ISP's DNS server might be a bad idea, because some of them are very, very slow. If you're trying to view a web page which has images and other media from lots of different domain names, it can take several seconds for the DNS server to give you all the addresses you need to download the resources and render the page.

So here's where third-party DNS comes in. If your ISP has slow DNS servers, you can configure your machine to use some other, faster DNS servers instead, and thus speed up your browsing experience considerably. There are many free DNS providers, including OpenDNS, UltraDNS, and of course, Google DNS. Some of these services make their money by serving ads to you when you try to visit a non-existent domain name. Depending on how you feel about ads, this could be a fair trade-off for increased browsing speed.

But how can you tell which DNS servers are the fastest for your machine? You could try each public DNS server one at a time, but that would take you a long time, and furthermore you wouldn't really have any method of measuring the speed short of how it "feels" in your browser. Fortunately, there is a benchmarking tool, NameBench, which will automatically test your ISP's DNS server, plus all the major free public DNS servers, and report back on which are the fastest for you. It gives you nice pretty graphs and tables, plus warns you about which DNS servers redirect you to ads in case you want to avoid those.

Below is the output of NameBench on my work machine. As you can see, it tells you right at the top which public DNS service is the fastest and by how much (over your existing settings). And it also gives you the recommended configuration settings for you (that is, the three fastest/nearest DNS servers). Using these configuration settings is as simple as typing them into /etc/resolv.conf (on GNU/Linux) or updating your network settings from the Control Panel/System Preferences (on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X). The rest of the information displayed won't be of much interest to the casual user, except possibly the "NXDOMAIN Hijacking" notes in the summary table which indicate the DNS servers which serve ads.

I recently discovered the phenomenon that is Postcrossing. It's an online

project where members all over the world send postcards at random to each other. Whenever you want to receive a postcard, you simply let the site know, and it gives you the address of another member. You send a postcard to that member, they mark it in the system as received, and then you end up getting a postcard from some other

Anyway, I signed up—or rather, I signed Frettchen up—and she just received her first postcard! It's from a girl named Nadine in Wolfsburg, though the postcard depicts the Burg Meersburg some 700 km away.

Yesterday I went to the previously announced Icelandic Cultural

Afternoon at the Swedish Church in London with my Icelandic housemate, a classmate from my Icelandic class, and of course Frettchen. It was an entertaining program (apart from a rather boring speech by a politician), with music, cinema, live theatre, a book reading, visual artwork, food, and drink. My favourite act was Smári & Kári, who did a hilarious

Throughout the afternoon I was sitting next to a little Icelandic girl who eventually commandeered Frettchen from me. Towards the end of the program, we were shown the debut of an Icelandic short film, and I was surprised to see that it starred the little girl and her pet bunny rabbit! So now Frettchen can say that she has hobnobbed with an up-and-coming Icelandic movie star, Hera Birgirsdóttir. :)

Here are a couple mustelid videos for you to enjoy today. First, we have the ever-adorable Frettchen von Rättchen eating a banana at the office on Friday:

Next, a video several of my colleagues and friends were raving about after seeing it on television yesterday. It's a clip from a BBC nature documentary featuring a stoat hunting a rabbit. (Embedding is disabled so follow the picture link for the video.)

The Icelandic Society in London is hosting a free Icelandic Cultural Afternoon on Sunday, 29 November. Anyone interested in coming along?

I tried to sign up on the eHarmony dating website just now and, after spending about an hour filling in personality questionnaires, the site has told me that, for their purposes, I'm effectively undateable:

Unable To Match You At This Time

eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.

We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.

Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.