administrivia and much use of the phrase "and/or".

I've just done a small amount of tinkering with my friends list. Added a couple of people and removed a few more - on the basis that I use my friends list primarily as a way to filter who sees my private posts, I've taken off a few people who I feel I don't know very well and/or who never comment on my posts, so I suspect don't actually read them. If you are offended by this, and/or if you do enjoy reading my posts, just you never think of anything to write as a comment, let me know (email is fine) and I'll re-add you.

I am thinking about removing more people too - if you never or hardly ever comment on my posts, but you do read them, comment in reply to this one so I know you are still here and don't take you off the list :) People who are reasonably good friends of mine in real life don't need to bother - it's only online-only aquaintances I'm likely to remove.

I've also set up a "non-default view" friends group for when I have more time and/or are bored with my work and want more journals to read, but don't want to view the unfiltered list in its entirety, with the spammy communities and all.

I had forgotten...

...that Micro$oft Excel can only plot up to approximately 32000 data points. It has been more than 5 years since I had to plot large files. But it is rather important to show an absolute plot of the data as the very first result of my thesis, and most of my stations have somewhere in the region of 60000 data points. Faced with the choice between IDL or... IDL, I started looking for alternatives. The one that was recommended to me before was Kaleidagraph, which is a native Mac program also ported to Windows, but the copy I have is (a) of dubious origin (b) sitting on my mum's old Windows 3.1 machine, and thus at least 6 years out of date. I thought, now I actually have (a small amount of) money, if I'm going to use software I should buy it legitimately, but the official Kaleidagraph website was entirely lacking in prices, saying "We'll update this on Monday", and prices from other online sites varied from US$179.99 to £170.38. Ack!

I thought I was going to have to do battle with the IDL-monster after all, but Richard reminded me of the existence of Gnuplot, which appears to do what I need. And thus Richard remains my best friend in the whole world ever :)

bad-tempered misinterpretation

I saw a sig file which reads: "There is a flame lurking within all of us deep in our souls trying to escape. All you have to do is reach down, far below the surface and bring it out into the world like a new-born child in the palm of your hand." What does it say about either me or the company I keep that I read that as "flame" in the sense of flaming an idiot?

HP doujinshi.

Doujinshi is Japanese fan fiction. It's usually in comic form, and sold as magazines. Doujinshi exists for just about every Japanese cartoon or video game imaginable - I don't know how the copyright law applies for it, because it's hardly ever licensed by the copyright holder (in fact, it could be that licensed fic is called something other than "doujinshi"). I don't actually know very much about the cultural aspects at all, because it's almost always Japanese-language only, and my knowledge of Japanese is limited to the names of food and the odd game reference ("Appendo disco!").

Anyway, today on eBay I saw some Harry Potter doujinshi. I think this is the first doujinshi I've ever seen for something of Western origin, so it's curious for that. If you want to see the HP characters done in anime-style, look here, here and here. I particularly like the last one.