If you think you can do better than the nameless script writer who coined the stumbled over words for Neil Armstrong's alleged first moon walk, Science, So What? is running a competition in conjunction with Metro: Moon Bounce

Break out the Molson, pass round the poutine and let's see those Nanaimo bars. It's Canada Day!

According to Wikipedia, Canada is technologically advanced, so I'm also hoping to see ray guns, teleporters and instant translators.

Mon ostie de saint-sacrament de câlice de crisse, ouais! (that's 'Fuck, yeah!' in Quebecois apparently).

From HPL's either tedious (or fun YMMV) The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath:

"... Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before ..."

Dreamlands ... that Limnal Region. These are the dreams of Unknown Kadath, a non-euclidean journey to explore strange new vistas; to seek out squamous entities and eldritch civilizations: to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before.

The Shadow Cabinet will be giving up their second jobs. but according to the BBC, Cameron said while he did not want to see the Commons full of "professional politicians" it was necessary to focus "100%" on the general election.

So if they're not professionals, what are they going to do with the rest of their time, clean their moats?

Neil Young does go on a bit, doesn't he?

I'm going to see the 20-20 game between Surrey and Essex at the Oval on Thursday. I've not seen professional cricket before so I'm quite excited about the prospect and with no internationals that day I hope to see Cook, Bopara, Napier and Kaneria. And I guess Afzaal, Ramprakash and Nel too.

And it's at the very civilised time of 17:30.

Yog-sothoth.com is hosting my recording of Dan Harms' talk on the Necronomicon held at Treadwell's on 28^th May 2009.

It's an erudite and entertaining talk by the expert on such matters.

From today's Guardian:

Pagans may be more visible now, but where's the evidence that "Everyone's a pagan now" apart from "there are said to be more than a quarter of a million"? I'll believe in the resergence of this religion when I hear of the first schism.
John Davies
Lancaster

Obviously he's never heard of Bitchcraft and Bicca.

Massive result for the USA tonight, overcoming a six goal deficit on goal difference to go through to the semi-finals of the Confederation Cup. They beat Egypt 3-0 whilst Italy lost by the same margin to Brazil. And it's always nice to see one of the family* grab a goal, even if he does play for Fulham.

Mind you, I don't rate their chances against Spain who have won 15 on the trot.


*I guess we might be n-degree cousins but I doubt it's very close.

I found this on my study wall earlier this week. It wasn't quite that big, I didn't have to feed it hamburgers to make it leave.

"They are showing their enmity against the Islamic Republic system and the most evil of them is the British government."

We're top of the list according in Iran. I wonder what we have to do to get a #1 in France?

gb_steve is my handle for inane chatter and so on. I wasn't going to, and then I realised it's like at work where a remarkable amount of contacts are established and interesting information shared between smokers. There's probably a patch you can get.

I've been using some Access VBA written by someone else to import massive text files.

The transfertext command asks for a specification name. This is what help says about it:

"Specification Name The specification name for the set of options that determines how a text file is imported, exported, or linked. For a fixed-width text file, you must either specify an argument or use a schema.ini file, which must be stored in the same folder as the imported, linked, or exported text file."

The code has some specifications named in it but they needed changing because the data was in a slightly different format. Nowhere could I find where these formats were saved.

It turns out that the only way to find them is to use the Text Import Wizard advanced options and there they are. You need to pretend to import a file and get about half-way through to define a new spec and save it.

And then I got "Property Error" messages which I worked out, after some head scratching and web-searching, meant that my database was over 2GB at which Access fails.

Rant over.

I was searching for some information on FAME, a company information database provided by Bureau van Dyke using a feed from Companies House. Specifically, I wanted to know how CH holds their data and what BvD do with it. I think CH hold scanned records which BvD take and use to create their commercial database.

Anyway, for some reason access to bvdep.com is running very slowly from here at the moment. Our web access can be a bit cranky sometimes. And then I found I'd been diverted to Bing, Microsoft's new Goolge-busting search engine. Like hijacking my web use is going to make me use them!

Here are the European election results for Southwark. Whilst much of the rest of the country has gone blue, we're still red.

Name of Party or Individual Candidate	Votes	%
The Labour Party>	14958	34%
Conservative Party	7951	18%
The Green Party	7606	17%
United Kingdom Independence Party	3645	8%
Liberal Democrats	2348	5%
British National Party	2174	5%
Christian Party "Proclaiming Christ`s Lordship"	2047	5%
English Democrats Party	564	1%
No2EU: Yes To Democracy	526	1%
Socialist Labour Party	480	1%
Rejected Ballots	388	1%
Pro Democracy: Libertas.eu	255	1%
Steven Cheung	221	1%
Jan Jananayagam	163	0%
Jury Team	140	0%
The Socialist Party of Great Britain	138	0%
Yes 2 Europe	109	0%
Gene Alcantara	57	0%
Sohale Rahman	43	0%
Haroon Saad	42	0%
Turnout		30%

West Ham has been bought out by a subsidiary of its main creditor, some Icelandic bank. The new owners are CB Holdings where the CB stands for Claret and Blue.

West Ham is possibly the most valuable asset in Iceland with Luis Boa Morte alone being worth half a small volcano just outside Reykjavik. And at all home games next season, the team will enter the pitch to the dulcet tones of Sigur Ros.