It seems that the British Government, led by Gordon Brown has in fact invoked the Crime and Security Act of 2001 against Iceland. In October he invoked this act to freeze the British assets of Icelandic bank Landsbanki during the Icelandic financial crisis, by virtue of the fact that the Treasury reasonably believed that “action to the detriment of the United Kingdom’s economy (or part of it) has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons (thank you Wikipedia).

Hour by hour and day by day the actions of the British government are indiscriminately obliterating Icelandic interests all over the world and, in so doing, diminishing the assets that could be used to reimburse depositors with Icelandic banks in the United Kingdom and Iceland.

http://www.indefence.is/Home

Lovely isn’t it.

What Brown has done and is doing is wrong. It’s hurting a peacful country and unfairly destroying their reputation.

There’s an online petition that I urge you to sign, add your name to the list of those who will not stand for what’s being done.

Sign the Petition!

No, I’m neither British or Icelandic, but that just goes to show what’s been done is wrong. I’m all the way on the opposite side of the globe and horrified.

Iceland isn’t a terrorist country.

Wish me luck!

Short post is short.

I’ve two retainers that I’ve gotta wear for a while, they’re clear plastic and fit like a very thin and molded perfectly mouth-guard. They’re annoying to eat with, but it’s better than my teeth moving back to how they were.

R.I.P. Braces.

Yes, the answer is simple.

You ask the person a question like “Point to the town you come from?”, as then the liar will point to Truthtown, and the truth-teller will also point to Truthtown. Simple huh.

Of course there’s also this method (thanks phoe xD).

Anyhoo, some new riddles. These are just really simple ones, and you can easily google for an answer. Try not to.

I know a word of letters three. Add two and fewer there will be.

Interesting.

How many bricks are required to complete a building made from only bricks?

Fun, builder questions.

How many times can 5 be subtracted from25?

Maths!

Finally my favourite. When told incorrectly it has no answer. You have to tell it correctly to get the answer.

Think of words ending in -GRY. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.

The last one is the main one, the rest are just teases. Answers in a few days, but only when someone makes an attempt and comments here.

Seriously though, whenever there is new food to be sold on a Friday they send around this massive email to advertise it. It’s fucking annoying since it’s so bloody hard to read.

Here’s a screenshot.

If you look at the text to the right, that’s the normal Google ads text. I had to zoom it out that far to get it to fit in a screenshot.

Seriously guys, you can write an email without the massive fucking text. It’s hard enough to read it. It doesn’t make me want to go buy your stuff any more, it just makes me hit delete that much sooner.

What I didn’t mention was the other side to it. The link.

Every so often, much sooner than the image generation, my link gets the stats and decides what’s important. Then it will bounce to that particular area until the next generation when it’ll decide again. Basically I stick the same link with the card, but when clicked on depending on certain criteria it could go anywhere for the minicity.

So it may decide to increase transport, or industry, or population. I need to tweak it slightly so it doesn’t offer other’s too soon, but it’s pretty neat.

It, along with my image generation script, write the status and update to a email queue script I wrote, which once a day sends me an email summarising the actions. This I like as it means the actions are all there listed, I can see what was linked to, whether or not the image was successfully generated ect…

I’m hoping to expand on my mail queue for other automated tasks. That way I only get one email instead of many. Trust me, many are annoying.

I might tweak the image generation code to include my current rank, then I might just make the image code publicly available for anyone who wants it. It’ll be crude, and it’ll have to be tweaked to get it working for anyone else, but it does the trick for me.

I did try using complicated feed parsers found online, but in the end I used my own basic cURL and expressions to parse the XML.

You are a traveller and you’re lost. Now, there are two towns nearby, truthtown and lietown (original names FTW!). Everyone in truth town can only tell the truth, while everyone in lietown can only tell a lie.

Now, you’ve come across a person who is sitting in the road, equal distance from either of the two towns. Unfortuately neither of the towns are marked, and you need to head to lietown for some reason or another.

You can ask the person one question, and this question needs result in you knowing which town is which.

What’s the question you ask?

Here’s the catch. The person could either be from lietown, as in they’ll lie to you, or truthtown, as in they’ll tell the truth. You have no way of knowing. So just asking “Which town is lietown” wouldn’t work, since the liar would point to the wrong town, while the truth teller would point to the correct town.

I was just randomly thinking about riddles like this. The answer isn’t really important, it’s more the reasoning. Problem solving is an important skill to have, and a lot of employers are interested in creative problem solving techniques.

So this time I’m starting with a blank inbox and working it out.

On Gaia I’m a moderator, and when you leave your online light on, you’re constantly PMed messages that could easily be sent elsewhere. We have entire forums dedicated to some of the messages. I’ve said it before, I’m not technical support. Ask in the Q&A forum on Gaia first!

Today is day one, current PM count: 0.

Anyway, these holidays I’m going to try and shift my sleeping pattern so I go to sleep earlier and get up earlier. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some more stuff done in the morning.

Speaking of random stuff, my little minicity script I mentioned in the previous post, well I may have a solution to my interesting issue. Been working on it and will work on it again tomorrow.

Started twittering again, it’s fun.

I know, not much to this post, I’m sleepy. I’m going to try and go to bed soon, so today is day 1 of my sleep pattern shifting.

It is now 11:45pm, Sunday 28th September 2008.

It’s a card, duh. The city image doesn’t update, since I couldn’t be bothered to do that, but the actual stats do. Population, revenue, transport etc… all update to reflect what stats my real minicity have.

Basically I have a script run every few hours (since sooner is completely redundant) that grabs the information from the minicity site (who awesomely make the stats available in a XML feed to be used) and adds it. EDIT: Yeah, so overnight my timer script decides not to work. For now I’ll have to manually run them xD

Anyway, do me a favour? Click my city link?