BlogOfTheMoon

I don't know how long this will stay up, but do listen to it if you get the chance. The Condensed History of Tony Blair, a decade in 15 minutes, written by one of the founder members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company is really rather hilarious.

I've been meaning to blog about Escape Pod for some time, having been pointed to it by Kenny. It's an excellent science fiction podcast, broadcasting science fiction and fantasy short stories, along with film and book reviews and the occasional "flash" story – a very short story just based around a single idea, which can be very good. All the stories are available to download as MP3s under a Creative Commons licence and it's completely legal. The site pays the authors and most of the stories are reprints from the big American SF magazines (Asimov's, F&SF etc). I've listened to a lot to the stories and the quality is generally high. I've also have downloaded the entire archive for my MP3 player, providing me with over forty hours of listening goodness. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

As one of the 28,000 signatories to the e-petition against the introduction of ID cards, I got this response from the Prime Minister today. Reading it didn't only not convince me to his point of view but made me despair that he understands the facts himself. The Register has done a fairly thorough debunking of the response, with more detail from NO2ID. They put it much more succinctly than I could.

I've actually been meaning to post this since Christmas. Big Ginger Dave went to a lot of effort using Lego Factory to create a Lego walrus for me (link – the first one is Dave's). It was fun to put together, although I had to download the Lego Factory software and the model and use that to figure out how to do it! Even with that, it took about two hours to assemble one of them; I haven't got around to the second yet ;-). Just one note of annoyance: the Lego software seems awfully buggy and has one of the worst UIs that I've ever seen. Avoid it until at least the next major version.