An Arkansas man has apparantly awoken from a 19 year coma.

This raises an interesting point – namely medical ethics. Now that it has been demonstrated that someone can recover from that length of time in a coma, will doctors be more prepared to keep coma patients on life support for longer periods of time?

On a lighter note, as the article mentions, back in the early Eighties, America lived in constant fear of being bombed, by a foreign power. Strange how things change isn’t it?

I had the weirdest experience last night with a floppy (disk! Put that smirk down.)

Daz returned on Sunday night with an old laptop from his dad. I don’t know the technical specs, but it’s definitely old school. It’s got Win for Workgroups 3.11 on it. You can close down Windows and go to the DOS command line and all that stuff. The software’s limited, but it’s got Write, so I figured I could sit it on my lap and type whilst watching TV. But first I had to get a copy of the Union Jack script off my PC and onto the laptop.

So I found a diskette, and I saved the script as .txt. Then I went downstairs and popped it into the laptop. No sign of the file- a bunch of tiffs I didn’t recognise and not a single .txt. Now, my PC has issues with saving things sometimes (I’ve yet to lose anything as a result, I just consider it an ‘eccentricity’) so I thought I’d try again. Back upstairs and pop the disk back in, saving an .rtf and .doc as well this time.

Still no script as far as the laptop’s concerned.

I tried a couple more times, then I thought of checking what the PC thought was on the floppy. Various file format versions of the Union Jack script, and no tiff files. So I thought I’d see what happened when I saved something on the disk from the laptop. I took the disk upstairs and popped it in the PC.

Which immediately shut down.

This stunned me. It pissed off Emily, who was halfway through an unsaved LJ post at the time. Then it just got weirder. When the PC had rebooted I opened Windows Explorer and clicked on the A drive. The computer tried to install Easy CD Creator 5. It did this every time I clicked on the A drive. Much cancelling ensued, but eventually I got it to shut up long enough to look at the drive’s contents. Unsurprisingly, the file I’d saved from the laptop was nowhere to be seen. Strangely, for a 1.44meg disk, the total data on it weighed in at 1.58 megabytes!

I don’t know. I think the floppy is some intersecting node between parallel universes. When it’s in the laptop I can see the content (the tiff files) from one universe and on my PC, the other. If the laptop only had an image package that could handle tiffs, I’d be able to get a glimpse of my other existence.

The problem was solved with an unsullied disk, formatted in the laptop.

The Gettysburg address in Arabic.

I finally did it, I finally went in. It’s something I told myself I’d do years ago. You can’t see in from the outside, the windows are blocked off and hung with esoteric equipment. There was chain hanging up by the door.

Inside, it was lighter than I’d expected, with close packed shelves full of all manner of strange implements. Normally, at this point, I’d skulk around for a while, staring at things I didn’t need or understand. But today I knew exactly what I wanted. I didn’t realise I could get it by the metre though.

I’m feeling all satisfied now. Now I know where to go next time I need DIY stuff.

I’ve just been given a small squidgy ball with the company logo as a stress toy. The label reads

“This is not a toy! Not suitable for children Due to small parts/Sharp edges”.

As it is a foam sphere about the size of an orange, I’m a bit baffled where it’s sharp edges or small parts are.

English Nature is pushing the idea of planting mini meadows on rooftops. It’s a win-win plan, soaking up pollutants, insulating the buildings and encouraging diversity in the oddest places.

via burnttoast

Can you imagine what I’d come up with for the news that Stonehenge is actually a giant prehistoric vagina?

via burnttoast

Or at least it soon will be, now that the world’s largest portable inkjet printer has been designed, developed and armed with a can of spray paint by two Swiss students.

How long before rich, budding young graffiti artists desperate to get their tags noticed start using this method to attract attention?

Today’s stage of the Tour was disrupted by striking actors tryiong to block the road. Links when I find some.

After the tykes guest editing G2 yesterday, today it’s the over 60s editing GuardianUnlimited.

Today’s Guardian G2 section has been produced by a bunch of 16 year olds.

I hate them. They’re all far more eloquent than I was at their age. Little buggers.

We’re veering off into Columbo territory here- a man died after deliberate sabotage of his parachute. By all accounts, it’s tricky to mess with a parachute and then repack it so the tampering isn’t obvious, so they’re looking for an expert.

It seems that the firemen are still at the site of last weeks tyre fire. For some reason they don’t seem to have a water supply at the site and they’re running a pipe along the entire length of Mount Road and an unknown amount of Hyde Road. It’s well over a mile long and has several big leaks in it (soaking cars on the opposite side of the road). My car probably needed a wash anyway.