Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Rayner's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, June 27th, 2009
4:07 am	Arse moriendi Right. I've been thinking about this dead singer bloke and everyone's reactions, and I seem to be coming to different conclusions to most people. This means I must inflict my thoughts on you lot for instructive purposes. First of all, the most notable feature of all the Michael Jackson jokes so far is that they have been a bit crap. Look, people, it's not like there's a lack of comedy potential here. As an upstanding citizen of the Internet, I demand better depravity than this. Secondly, the important bit. When I die, you all have my prior permission — indeed, encouragement — to make the most tasteless jokes you can possibly think of. If they also involve a boxful of dead babies, a wood chipper, and elephant penises, even better. There's no bloody point dying if everyone's going to stand around all po-faced and solemn about it. You see, I will be dead. If there is no afterlife, I will be incapable of giving a shit. If there is an afterlife, I will have better things to do than give a shit. Furthermore, being all serious and respectful will be a distraction from the fact that there are enormous opportunities to consider. Just for a start, I hope that, within 24 hours of my death, there will be nothing left of any alcohol I owned. Before the authorities know I'm gone, I hope my identity will be used to relieve a major bank of a figure with many zeroes on the end, used to buy several tons of illegal explosives, and named as the sender on a crate of rabid badgers express-couriered to Tony Blair. You have my permission to take my corpse and fire it into the Houses of Parliament using a trebuchet, with a note attached reading "I hate the whole fucking lot of you". Alternatively, try to reanimate it as a zombie or cyborg or flying skull or something. Yes, I hereby donate my body to Mad Science. Don't accept ideas from anyone tedious like Damien Hirst. Gunther von Hagens' "The Science of Goatse" exhibition is the lower bound of acceptability here. If, when I die, you get an idea that's hilarious, insane, head-explodingly awesome, or preferably all three, I reckon you should go for it. Don't you buggers dare mope around being "respectful" when you could be thinking of ingenious ways to give those fucking Acai Berry spammers rectal prolapses. Right, I'm off to bed. If I should die before I wake, and all that. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
5:20 pm	Setting a bad example My pension company is urging me to save the environment by switching to paperless communications. Personally, I think they could start by not sending me two copies of my annual statement and three copies of the "Go Paperless" leaflet. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
12:22 pm	Er, yes it is... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 9th, 2009
1:38 pm	I bought a coffee and some fries at Burger King on Saturday, because I was about to go on a three-hour bus journey and needed something to keep me from dying of starvation before I got to the end of it. This cost three pounds and something, which is a rant all in itself. But anyway, this is how the transaction went: Me: *pays with a ten pound note* Server (handing me six pound coins and some shrapnel): Sorry, no fivers. Me: No worries. Just a sec, this one's a fake. And this one... oh, and this one too. Do you have any real money? He did, at least, exchange them without fuss, but I bet they went straight back in the till for the next poor sod who is in too much of a hurry to check their change. After all, he'll just get in a heap of trouble at the end of his shift if he's short by a few pounds. If I have to put up with much more of this, I'm going to start paying for everything with my own personal currency, which will consist of notes saying "I promise to moon the bearer on demand". This, you understand, is a more meaningful promise than you get from the Bank of England. And despite all this, I still seem to have another two of these bastard things in my wallet. To whoever's making them: if I find out who you are, I intend to cram them into all of your available orifices until you die of lead poisoning. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
1:51 am	One of my earliest childhood memories. I have very few memories of the most impressionable, formative years of my life. A scattered handful, however, occasionally surface, and this is one of them. When I was a little toddler, I had a jack-in-the-box. But this wasn't the jolly, smiling, bouncy toy you're thinking of. Oh no. On pressing the little button on the front of the casing, the catch would click open and a low, moaning wail would shudder from the innards of the box. The pitch rose to the squeal of a bird being devoured alive as the lid very... slowly... crept... open, the shadows within revealing a limbless, swollen-faced mockery of the human form squirming from its prison. My parents tell me they tried introducing me to this infernal device more than once, and every time I burst into tears and ran away. Other children had alphabet blocks and teddy bears. I had a deformed screaming homunculus in a box. [EDIT]: The diabolical contraption has a web page. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
3:17 pm	People who argue about the Monty Hall Problem really get my goat. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 15th, 2008
6:14 pm	If A. A. Milne were a financial journalist A news story on today's Yahoo Finance - possibly through being typed in a hurry - described the world's stock markets as "tumbley". I thought this was a charmingly whimsical way of reporting billions of pounds of losses. The next step was, of course, this: ( A Bear Market of Very Little Brain ) I am sure someone out there can write a better attempt than that. Anyone feel up to it? (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
5:37 pm	The Large Hadron Collider has a webcam. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
3:49 am	Blue eyed dressed for every situation... So. Yazoo are back together for a reunion tour, 25 years after they split up. Alison Moyet, she of the unmistakable husky voice. Vince Clarke, he who is the synthesiser-geek half of Erasure. Much wonderfully bouncy synthpop. There is practically no way it can fail to be awesome. I intend to go. Who else is interested? Their last UK date is at the Hammersmith Apollo, this Thursday night. So if you want to come, speak up now so that I can get tickets on Monday. (I know there is at least one person on my friends list who would like this. Come on, it's worth flying several thousand miles at short notice, right?) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 6th, 2008
2:51 pm	Tomorrow I'll be on a 20-mile sponsored walk along the Thames Path to raise money for BLISS, the charity for improving the chances of survival for premature babies. It's in support of BLISS to commemorate the organiser's two nieces, who were born last year at just 25 weeks, and who are both deeply missed. We are walking from Hampton Court to Windsor, with a lunch break at the ten-mile point in Chertsey. You can sponsor us by going to http://www.justgiving.com/blisswalk. Any and all support is welcome and very much appreciated. If nothing else, sponsor me for getting up at some horrible hour of the morning to get to Hampton Court by nine o'clock. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
6:47 pm	I saw this sidebar ad for plastic surgery today. So... did she only have enough money to get one of them enlarged, or something? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 24th, 2008
8:15 pm	Computer clearout, part 1 If you want any of these things, please comment. They are free to anyone who'll take them away. Also, does anyone have any spare SCSI cables lying around? Mini Tower PC: AMD K6 266MHz processor Gigabyte GA-5AA motherboard with AGP, PCI and ISA slots. 64Mb RAM CD-ROM and floppy drives No hard drive or graphics card (I can probably find a hard drive somewhere if you want one, though). AT case Bay Networks Advanced Remote Node (model CV1001004). Two 10Mbit Ethernet ports (RJ45 and AUI connectors). Three 44-pin serial ports. ISDN BRI S/T module. DB9 serial console. DB9 modem port. Has a 32Mb PCMCIA flash memory card. 1U rack-mount case. Front bezel keeps falling off. Came out of a skip and I have no idea what I'll ever need it for. Four 1Gb IDE hard drives. Two CD-ROM drives (IDE). Four 3.5" floppy drives. 3.5" to 5.25" mounting kit, for putting a floppy drive or similar into a 5.25" bay. Yamaha sound card (ISA slot) 10/100 Ethernet card Sound Blaster Vibra16 sound card (model CT4170). 11 IDE cables, various lengths 5 floppy cables, various lengths A couple of CD audio cables (the ones that go from a CD drive to the sound card). 2 KVM cables (I think - they've got male PS/2 connectors on each end, anyway). Modem cable Phone extension cable Heat sink and fan (from a Pentium 2, I think) Small pair of PC speakers Mouse pad Bag of broken stuff: hard drives, motherboards, expansion cards, RAM, floppy drives, etc. Maybe you can use them for spare parts or in a craft project or something. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
6:15 pm	Two links for your amusement The Telegraph makes an unfortunate choice of words. A Scunthorpe Problem in the wild. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
7:06 pm	Overheard on the train "...he put the stuff on his ear, like. That was before he caught fire..." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
1:19 am	The knob-enlargement spammers are getting more and more surreal: Many men suffer from a smaller than average manhood, but finally, you can change that To hell with mathematics, now everyone can be above average! 12 more inches aint so bad, dont you think so? Twelve more inches? Either standards have gone WAY up, or I'm getting spam intended for elephants. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
11:40 pm	Chilli chicken + poor chopstick control + eyes = FAIL Dumpster-diving two oscilloscopes on the way home = WIN (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 25th, 2008
9:44 pm	I wonder if hobbit parents tell their kids, "Eat that up, it'll put hair on your feet". (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, February 11th, 2008
2:16 am	Personal ad smartarsery One day, quite some years ago, I was browsing Gumtree and wandered into the personal ads section, as one does (you've given in to curiosity too, admit it). And I saw a woman advertising for a "one nightstand". So I wrote back, saying that I would offer her a tallboy to go with her nightstand, but I was only 5 foot 7. For some reason, I never got a reply. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
10:12 pm	Hardwearing A few years ago, I found a Creative AWE64 sound card in someone's garden. It was covered in grit and mud, and the connectors were mottled with rust. It looked like the kind of thing that gets dug up on Time Team. So—as many of you will already have guessed—I took it home, rinsed it off thoroughly under the hot tap, poked it with cotton buds until no more gunk came out of the headphone socket, and left it to dry on a radiator. Then I put it in my big box of bits and promptly forgot about it. Today I plugged it into a PC. It works perfectly. When these people make sound cards, they make sound cards. Current Mood: impressed (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
11:40 pm	A discovery It is possible for something to be simultaneously a good and bad idea. For example, if one has a cold that is so bad it causes a constant stinging pain somewhere just below one's eye sockets for thirty-six maddening hours, one might eventually be driven to try snorting Ultra Chloraseptic spray. It has benzocaine in it, you see. This: Burned like a Tabasco sauce enema for about 30 seconds. There was running in circles, and strangled screaming. Worked well enough to make me repeat the action on the other nostril. This is not forbidden on the warning leaflet, but that might be for the same reason that doors do not have warnings to say "do not slam this on your head". The cold is, however, now getting better. N.B. Nothing I post should ever be construed as medical advice. (7 Comments |Comment on this)