Personal

Something interesting occured to me recently. Evolution of the human species has been basically halted by healthcare. Since the weak no longer die before reproducing, the makeup of the genes of subsequent generations is random. The good news is the cure needs no effort as such. If we let the population grow until we no longer have enough food then people will start dying more. The people who manage to survive will pass on their genes and evolution will begin again. The only question remains is whether the survivors are the sort of people we want continuing the species. They will predominantly be the rich and although many rich people get that way by being smart or more productive somehow, some of them definitely don’t.

starvation, evolution, over population

I decided on a whim to try PartyPoker.com (for free) and ended up having far more fun than I expected.

Unfortunately the minimum deposit to play for money is $50 which is far more than I’m willing to spend…

For a while I’ve noticed my computer running slower and slower for no apparent reason. Although I have a fairly old computer (Athlon 1.2GHz) it was running far slower than it should have been.

A (not so) quick look in task manager revealed a possible culprit - Firefox was running and taking up 80Mb of memory and it was increasing. Anybody any ideas what could cause a sudden and persistent memory leak in Firefox? The only extra I have installed is LiveHeaders. Until it’s fixed I’ve had to revert to IE.

I’ve decided to run a silly little competition in an attempt to get people looking around the site more. The traffic I’ll be getting is probably going to be of a pretty low quality but if you sling enough mud, some must stick.

So check it out and you might just win $10.

I was idly wandering around Technorati and found the 16th most popular blog on there is apparently Wil Wheaton’s blog.

Playing possibly the most annoying Star Trek character of all time doesn’t seem to have been a problem after all. A quick glance around at the stuff on the page suggests a person far more web aware than I imagined: Firefox supporter, Onion reader, blogads user…

I might just have to buy that book of his (a review of which on Amazon reveals I’m rather late in discovering his blog).

I’m now officially one ninth of my way through the Pimsleur German course (that is I’ve finished Unit 10 of German I - Beginner). It’s still as good as I said previously. Although I think perhaps they should rename “How to be annoying in German”. Towards the end of unit 10, you have a conversation with a woman about having a meal.

“She will suggest a series of times to you. Refuse each time in turn and suggest an hour later.”

Another funny thing I noticed looking at the covers for the rest of the course, the three levels are “Beginner”, “Intermediate” but not “Advanced”. The third level is “Intermediate Plus”. Subtle way of saying even if you complete the course you have a way to go yet.

Least favourite German fragment so far: “jetzt nichts”.

In March I spent a weekend in Blackpool with my girlfriend, mainly to go to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, a theme park. While we were there we briefly met a guy trying to sell us a CD of “monk rock” or something (one of those people collecting for a good cause basically.

Well yesterday we met him again in Rotherham. Same person doing the same thing. Quite how unlikely it is that one of us could meet the same guy twice is amazing, but we spend a lot of time apart so to think we could both meet him together is even more amazing.

I decided if Ryan is going to post more often there needs to be an easier way to tell our posts apart, so I decided to fiddle around with the theme a bit. Basically all I did was put a div tag around all the posts setting the class to the author of the post and then added style information for .Ryan and .Oliver. I also changed the top header slightly too.

I gave blood today and I thought I’d quickly ask you all to give blood! A lot of people I talk to who don’t give blood tend not to have a good reason not to other than vague apathy (i.e. just not getting round to it).

So if you can give blood (and you probably can), you should give blood!

Some links below for information about donating blood:

UK America Scotland Ireland

Or just search Google for donate blood and your country of choice for information.

donate blood, blood donor, blood, donor

According to the Google Toolbar in FireFox www.oliverbrown.me.uk now has a PageRank of 5.

My conclusion is that tags are a good way to get links to your blog since a quick search on Google for oliverbrown.me.uk returns mainly sites indexing tags in some way.

So if you aren’t using them already (and apparently two thirds of blogs aren’t) then get using them!