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The image should've come from Borges. Or Julian Barnes. But in fact,
it was in Tim Nott's column in PCW, where (in describing his
collection of software) he tosses at us the wonderful image of "like
the story of the old lady who died, and in her house they found a box
labelled 'bits of string too short to keep'"...
Other pages on this site (Very short bits of string)
- The ART Director Speaks, Peter Bondar's infamous post to comp.sys.acorn
- British Patriotic Songs, shock friends
at your next Last Night of the Proms party by knowing the
words!
- Holoalphabetic sentences
- Why did the chicken cross the road?
There used to be another one, Engineers explained,
which I got rid of when I discovered it was actually a chapter of
Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Principle, which you
should thus get instead (it's very good).
Pages on other sites (Slightly longer bits of string)
-
search engine at ECM Selection for software jobs in Cambridge doesn't work at
the moment, and they seem to be making no
effort to fix it, but in the meantime you can check out
their top page. Also
worth checking out are PCR and
TAPS.
- Alsager Tour Guide:
"Looking back at my childhood, all I see is a street like any
other street, in a town like any other town. But somehow I still
look back -- with wonder".
- Searchable
on-line archive of recipes, over 30,000 of them too.
- Marple Hall
High School, the school I went to, has a web page now, but
it's pants.
- I used to suck only
occasionally, but now I suck every day before starting
work. Often the first question I ask people is, "Do you suck?"
- Classic articles from
the ACM, including Ken Thompson's legendary Unix backdoor
lecture.
- Stick
Figure Death Theatre, Tarantinesque snuff fiction in animated
GIF format. The accompanying review
uses the splendid word pleonasm.
- Cocktails archive at HotWired.
- The Six-Lesson
Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto. Worth reading if you're
a parent, or a schoolteacher, or even if your best friend's a
schoolteacher.
- Circuits
archive: all sorts of useful stuff in there. (Pah -- hardware).
- The Church of the
SubGenius, which is currently my favourite religion. Trouble
is, I can't really get excited about any religion... if
only SubG was a text editor or an operating system or something,
I could get really zealous about it.
- Philip Armitage's home
page -- any stars you've got you want crashing into accretion
discs, Phil's the man for the job.
- Ofsted
report on Marple Hall High School -- this is a 90K Acrobat (.PDF)
format file, for which you'll need to get your mitts on a reader if
you haven't got one. You can also get an Ofsted
report on Alsager Highfields County Primary School (which
used not to have the word "Highfields" in its name) -- they
loved it, even though Graham Bickerton seems no longer to be
Head.
- Charlie Don't Lead, which is not Tim Bevis's home page but is the nearest I can find to such a thing. Fortunately, it's not about HRH The Prince of Wales either, it's about climbing things.
- Awaken I don't really know
what this is, more than an Ancient Greek would know what a page of C++
was in aid of. But I think a bright enough Ancient Greek would realise
it was possibly quite important. I think Awaken is possibly quite
important.
- Liquid
Nitrogen Rocket as constructed from a five-gallon drinking water
bottle.
- The King's
English, by H W Fowler, 1908. Wow. And I thought I was a
pedant. "If any one were asked to give an Americanism without a
moment's delay, he would be more likely than not to mention I
guess." 1908! 'Forceful' was a neologism! 'Placate' and
'antagonize' were deprecated Americanisms!
- HAKMEM
- One
or two
pictures of the majuscules of Trajan's Column.
- RGO Information
Leaflets -- a dusty, dull old page (remember Royal Greenwich
Observatory staff are civil servants) with some brilliant potted
bits of astronomy. Real astronomy, all about sundials, the
Metonic Cycle and all that.
- Queriable UK
railway timetable.
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