Monthly archive: August 2009

One of those Facebook things that are sent around where you get tagged to do something and after you have done it you tag other people to do so.

Turns out I've read 22 of the BBC top 100 books (marked with an x in the list below). I could not find the original BBC source (the Big Read lists instead the 100 most loved books from a survey) so I have no idea who chose them and with which criteria, but this looks like a sensible list of must-reads. Perhaps aim to read them all? Not sure I've got enough time for another 78 books at the speed I read.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell x
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood x
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac x
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fieldin x
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker x
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert x
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad x
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Toole
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

1. You can use an electric toothbrush to pollinate tomatoes.
2. Red Bull is produced and sold by an Austrian company, and it is based on a Thai energy drink.
3. You cannot delete more than 4000 messages in Microsoft Outlook 2003 in a single operation.
4. The skin growths that appeared on poisoned Ukranian president Yushchenko helped save his life by isolating the dioxin away from his internal organs.
5. In Gmail, z undoes anything (even sending a message if you are quick) when keyboard shortcuts are enabled.
6. Fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone can override the body's sleep clock. This can also work with other irregular sleep patterns.
7. Left-hand traffic and left-hand drive are not the same thing. The former is when cars occupy the left side of the road, the latter means that the driver sits on the left in a vehicle. So vehicles in countries with right-hand traffic have left-hand drive, and viceversa.

Found this while tidying up and decided to use it. Brings back loads of memories from my trip in Feb/Mar 2008, would love to go back and see more of Australia.

Also, another test with PicPosterous (Posterous iPhone app) – finally learning how to use it after a couple of tries where first I did not name the album (and the post had no title) and then I added to an existing album (and it updated another post by adding this picture to it that I cannot remove without deleting the whole album), thus discovering that the iPhone app does not let you add text to the post. Email upload it is then if it is a post, or iPhone app if just a pic.

It's nice to see that knives can now be recycled alongside glass, plastic, tins and shoes.

And the second picture, that wallet-type thing? Just a test, trying to upload from PicPosterous iPhone app, selected 'add to untitled gallery' and it added to this. Neat – albeit not what I was looking for.

Used to work nearby (Whitehall) and passing by this every day. Haven't been in a while, apparently.

1. James Bond's creator Ian Fleming wrote 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car. Via a friend's friend who left a comment on my friend's Facebook.
2. If you extract numbers from a text string in Excel they are still stored as text (and therefore uncountable). To turn them into numbers you need to multiply the formula you used to extract numbers from a text string by 1.
3. Simon Le Bon's firstborn is a model like her mother.
4. Will Powers' 'Kissing With Confidence' (that I know via the original 'That's What I Call Music' CD) was part of a whole concept album 'Adventures In Success', a 'parody of the self-help/get rich quick gurus'. Via Joe.My.God.
5. Carly Simon provided (uncredited) the vocals for 'Kissing With Confidence'.
6. We love rounded corners so much because 'A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort'.
7. You get only one Gold Card (the paper counterpart to the annual Oyster London transport electronic ticket) per year. You lose it, you stop getting discounts on rail travel (because most of the British Rail ticket offices do not accept the printed receipt as proof of validity, even if TfL claims they should. I fear my Gold Card is likely to be in a recycling bin in Italy.