Tuesday Tagine: Thats no moon…

A Tagine is a rich meaty stew from North Africa, made with marinated meats and fruits… I’m hoping you get the analogy- this ‘Roast’ is somewhat late, but I hope better for the slow cooking and marinating process, filled with tasty fruit and nourishing meat.

If you couldn’t already tell, this is still Neko, guest blogging whilst the mighty Cas is away incubating her novel. I’ve not done one of these before, so she kindly supplied me with some links to get me started: I’ll run through hers first, then add some special spices of my own!

Firstly some things that made the news (and made me grin…)

The CIA have been editing wikipedia . I’m sure there are incisive comments I could make about the nature of communal knowledge and the dangers of open participation, or I could just laugh about some employees doing a Skeletor on the President of Iran…

The joys and dangers of applying technological solutions to family problems- a novel use of googles’ calendar facility documented in the NYT.

In your facebooks! Haxxing ur iPhone…Another interesting example of pervasive computing – not sure if this is a good thing or not, but a group of researchers are looking at hooking you Facebook profile to your mobile phone with Bluetooth, to suggest people you run into regularly but don’t already ‘know’ according to Facebook…

The BBC have integrated social bookmarking buttons on all their news content , which means it must officially be de-rigueur now, and the trendy kids will have to find something else to play with..

The new iLife release from apple has met with mixed reviews. I’m not a Mac user (The shock! The horror!) so I can’t really add anything to this one!

A UK radio station has received heavy criticism from a Dr for offering a boob job as a prize in a competition. I have to agree- even though I consider some cosmetic surgery necessary and possible beneficial, giving it away as a prize seems a bit beyond the pale.

The rest I found all by myself, and so have to officially absolve Cas of any responsibility!

How cool are these crows! I love corvidae in general, they are smart and always doing something daft. I think they like to play.

Cas and I both bookmarked this great webcomic, xkcd , and I’m pretty sure we both got to it via danah boyds blog . I’ve not read the entire back catalogue yet… but I loved it, even if I did have to explain some the really geeky jokes to my other half. I want one of the ‘ science, it works ‘ T-shirts to wear to archaeology conference where the theoreticians gather in droves and shudder at the word science every time one of us computing/ geophysics types uses it…

Will it blend? is, I guess, viral marketing, but it’s good viral marketing. Especially when they blend an iPhone and some glow sticks. Genius. I can feel a disturbance in the force… like a thousand Apple fanboys crying out in anguish… then silence…

Finally, playing with maps to make pictures is something archaeologists often get accused of (that isn’t a ceremonial complex, it’s just a bunch of random lines and dots….) but this is an ace variation on that, making animals out of the tube map…

That’s it for now folks… I’m handing over to Moose as of this time tomorrow as I’m off playing silly games. Be excellent to each other.

Neko out.

(Rapidly edited to fix my links- apologies to whoever read the first version of this, sorry! Not as much of a ‘net genius as the proprietor..)

Do not adjust your set…

Hi all, Neko here.

I’m babysitting the blog for a few days whilst our illustrious leader is away from broadband 🙂

This is really just to make sure the editing permissions are working OK, and to give you all fair warning!

Cas said I should introduce myself… I guess the best thing is to head over to my blog on the link above, that should give you some idea. I’m a fellow computing/ archaeology nut- I met Cas at uni, and we are frequent co-conspiritors of late, on diverse matters.

I don’t share her obsession with penguins, but it does not wierd me out! I might even try to write you all a roast on Sunday, there are some things that have caught me in the news….

I’m mainly going to moderate comments and zap spam though, so please just carry on as normal!