So what to say about this week? Well, I made it into work on Tuesday (woo hoo!), watched Knocked Up on Wednesday (enjoyable), assembled flat-pack furniture on Thursday, enhanced my leadership skills with three hours of e-learning on Friday, vegged around Meadow Towers on Saturday and wrote the Roast/did laundry on Sunday.

Not, all things considered, the most riveting of weeks, but then it can’t all be bungee-jumping off Tower Bridge and single-handedly white water rafting down the Congo. I am rejuvenated after last weeks unfortunate food poisoning incident and am ready to face the horrors my 25th birthday might have in store for me next week, that’s the important thing.

For some reason, the roastable material this week hasn’t been very forthcoming. Either I’m getting harder to please in my old age, or teh interweb is getting boring. Either way, enjoy what we (Moose normally contributes a good couple of links each week, and today is no different) have found for you.

The Eurostar can now make it from Paris to London in just over two hours. So I can get to another country by train faster than I can get back to the Homestead by train. That’s just not right!

A senior judge has called for the whole population and every UK visitor to go on a national DNA database. I can’t quite write a coherent argument as it’s just 10.30 and I only have one cup of tea under my belt, but the spidy senses are tingling more than a little. It’s also made me realise that I know more about civil liberties, privacy and legal rights in the States than I do in my own country (courtesy of too much CSI, NCIS, West Wing und so weiter). Something I should probably rectify before I start spouting off because I know there are significant differences!

Preston gets a Wallace and Gromit statue. Southampton gets laser lights. I live in the wrong city!

There is no substitute for sheer stupidity in this world.

Are you going Pink for October? Bright Meadow will be (though I will try to make it slightly less garish than last years eye-burning effort!)

And lastly, Facebook has announced that they are rolling out a limited public search on profiles. I’m not sure what my own feelings toward this are – a fairly typical blend of a knee-jerk “oh no, my privacy!” and “cool, more people will be able to find me” – and I haven’t had time to sort through all the possible implications in my brain, so I am going to do what I normally do in these situations: throw you in the direction of other informed discussion on the matter.

And then I am going to prod you in this direction for some thoughts on our tendency to go a little ga-ga and over the top about things.

And lastly, I shall end it all with a movie trailer for
Fierce People, the only one that’s caught my eye this week.

Now I’m off to watch a bit of the grand prix. Anything rather than hoover the flat as I have to do before the inspection tomorrow!

For those of you who haven’t been following my adventures on Tumbleweeds (and why not?), I am back in the country and I am recovering from what was almost certainly a short, swift, but definitely NOT very sweet bout of food poisoning. I want to blame some suspect fresh pasta Moose handed me on Thursday when I had nothing in the larder that tempted me for dinner. She wants to pin the blame on a dodgy Slimfast or some bug I picked up in Guernsey. Whatever the trigger, I’ve been lying round Meadow Towers, groaning pathetically for the past four days with just about enough energy to crawl to the sofa and watch episodes of Firefly all day, before crawling back to bed. Seriously! It takes more energy than you’d think to have a shower and wash and blow dry your hair. For the super-curious and to reassure those of you worried about my personal hygiene, the latter all have been taken care of. Slowly, and with many sit-downs to stave off fainting fits and embarrassing trips to A&E (you cracked your head open in the bathtub and then half-strangled yourself with the hairdryer cord how again, exactly?)

The diverse symptoms of possible food poisoning I won’t go in to because they were bad enough to experience first hand, let alone describe, but they have resulted in nothing more substantive than a few cream crackers and numerous glasses of water passing my lips since Thursday evening. Oh, and one cup of tea and an English muffin this morning that I’m not sure was the wisest move. Great for dropping a few pounds maybe, not the best for mental clarity or physical stamina. You would not believe how long it has taken me to write these few coherent sentences…

So I want to you take this Toast (just the thought of a roast right now is making me queasy…) as a sign that I do adore of all you, my blog-reading and commenting lovelies. It won’t be the best ever, or the longest, but I have missed you these past couple of weeks (thanks to Neko and Moose for looking after things and doing some great Roasts of their own) and didn’t want to keep you hanging around any longer for a genuine Cas post.

Because we (me especially) could do with a laugh, here’s a new web-comic that’s been catching my eye on and off lately – Rusty Fork.

Oh how I wish I had the mental thing-y-ness to write a coherent intro to this link right now, but I don’t. I’ve been slurring sentences, making up words, and just plain resorting to mime at times lately to get my meaning across (hand wave, gesture, frantic scribble, handwave, nod head, shake head, grimace, sigh Moose eventually managed to translate to “oh, you want to sign the tenancy agreement now?”). Take pity on me and go read how danah lost control of Facebook.

Not sexy, not funny, but useful: manual Gantt charting in Excel.

I have no idea how I stumbled across this site, but I’ve been an awed subscriber since before I got an RSS reader (so several years at least) – these gardens are just so gloriously beautiful.

Read and write on the screen, or resort to paper? Here’s how the greats do it. For the curious, here’s how I do it (an amalgam of laptop, notebooks, moleskines and lots of kit-kats).

Moose linked to The Nines movie trailer last week. This week it’s my turn to link to the audio commentary.

For the curious, the pictures from my recent trip to Guernsey. I didn’t take that many, being one of those people who prefers to look at the world as a whole, rather than just through a viewfinder, but I did take a couple of nice shots 🙂

And that’s it. I am now off to collapse on the sofa and watch either the rest of Back to the Future II, or more Firefly, depending on who wins the battle for the remote.