I’ve uploaded some pictures taken during Rose and my week’s holiday in the Cotswolds. The weather was particularly changeable for the week, but we still managed to have a good time and make the most of the stay. We visited several villages and towns nearby where we were staying, and spent a lovely day in Oxford.
The photos I take in dull weather are, by and large, fairly dull themselves; therefore, there are few online. This reflects my lack of skill rather than any lack of beautya or activities we enjoyed in the are.
I write so infrequently writing seems an activity somehow special. This leads me to only write when I feel I have something terrifically special to discuss, meaning I write little. It’s a vicious circle.
Throughout the course of the day, I have plenty of ideas for what I could write about, only to shoot myself down. Every few months I think about this, leading to such gems as Two Quirks of Our Flat where I write about whatever is on my mind. But still I haven’t escaped the circle.
Today it has been revealed the data of 80,000 prisoners has been “misplaced” by a contractor working for the Ministry of Justice. It seems not a month goes by in the halls of power where some rather sensitive does not go missing.
What amazes me is the slapdash nature of data handling practise. If the data was simply encrypted before burning to CD or memory stick this wouldn’t be an issue. It would take but a few minutes. Then, the conversation on the Today Program would go:
I saw a sign today in the bathrooms which neatly illustrates the problem a computer may have understanding a sentence. It said:
Please don’t put paper towels down the toilet as it causes them to become blocked.
If one were to go solely by the rules of grammar, one would be forced to conclude the paper towels would become blocked: “them” is a plural pronoun, meaning it must apply to the plural towels rather than the singular toilet when the sentence is considered in isolation.
Though only 24 years and without an ’elite education’, it was with a distressing sense of familiarity I read the first paragraph of The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries […] but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.