(b)logophile

My cycle route to work takes me through Spui, which hosts a second-hand book market every Friday. So I’ve started taking a half-hour on the way to browse. Last week turned up Grendel and a Mark Twain collected short stories, but this week I stumbled on something even better. Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata [...]

A couple of spams got past Gmail today. It seems they’re putting the spam pitch in an image, and padding out the message with random text. But the randomisation is getting cleverer, or else they’re scraping from some very strange sites… “When we last saw pesticide it wasn’t diebold. Then after messieurs or runt got [...]

The UvA is introducing a new system for tracking expense claims (travel, conference fees, &c.). Actually, they’ve already introduced it, a fancy web app which only runs under IE on Windows machines, and they’ve already decommissioned the old-fashioned paper system. If you send your paperwork to someone who can do anything about it, these days [...]

The short version: to use the WC at Amersfoort Station, you call an 0900 number that charges you and opens the door. Confused? So was I.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to this great Tuvan throat-singing punk band: Yat-kha. This is definitely going on the to-buy list. Not the most recent album, Re-Covers (they’re covering Led Zeppelin, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley! but the two tracks available as mp3 didn’t do much for me) but some of the older stuff such as [...]