| Inventive premises and their sticky complications
Fans of Michel Faber's voluptuous, exhaustively researched The Crimson Petal and the White, a Victorian novel to make the most worldly Victorian blush, are in for a more varied experience reading this, his latest book of stories released in North America. Unlike The Apple, which continues the stories of prostitute Sugar and her Crimson Petal cohorts, The Fahrenheit Twins has more in common with his debut collection, Some Rain Must Fall. Both books exhibit an eclectic array of styles and plots. Memorably inventive premises give rise to sticky complications as Faber writes his characters into trouble and then stands back while they struggle to get out. Although many of the endings are dropped or left inconclusive, the writing is clear, the pace snappy, and the effect entertaining if not always completely satisfying.
Light up those circuit boards
Where do old circuit boards go after the technology they powered has become obsolete? If they're lucky, they get recycled into arresting pieces of home decor, like this circuit board standing lamp. The concept is inspired in its simplicity - just surround each bulb with circuit boards to cast a soft glow that's nonetheless got that modern edge. Every circuit board is different, of course, so no two lamps are exactly the same. At $900 from Uncommon Goods, this lamp doesn't come cheap, even though I'd feel good that it's made from materials that aren't biodegradable and would otherwise sit in a landfill for centuries to come. A less daunting option might be the circuit board table lamps for $220-$280, but I think the standing lamp brings a much stronger accent to a room. .
Boy falls into sewer, traceless
Ghaziabad, April 17: A 12-year-old boy fell into a deep sewer while playing here today, triggering a massive search by emergency workers and Army personnel who were so far unable to locate him.
Aas Mohammad fell into the 15-foot-deep open manhole in Islamnagar area this morning and the local authorities after failing to find him called in the Army for rescue operation.
However, the rescue teams were virtually groping in the dark even after a 12-hour long search and they were unable to locate him because of the heavy flow of water in the sewer said to be four-kilometre-long.
An engineering detachment and two medical teams of the Army, that had rushed in from Delhi and Meerut, were on the job despite facing early difficulties in getting the sitemap of the drain and water lines from local authorities.
Set up Apache, PHP and MySQL like a n00b on OSX
This week I've been mulling the idea of using WordPress as a publishing platform for some new projects. On paper it seemed to have most of the requirements I was looking for but I wanted to get my hands dirty and see for myself how it worked and could integrate with some existing platforms. The problem is that I don't really have time to mess around with my current set up on my Mac and I find online demos somewhat restricting as you can't really see what is going on in the background. The solution was to quickly install a free software program called MAMP. Similar to the LAMP acronym this stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Apple's OSX operating system. Once downloaded the install was a breeze. In fact, it is a one click install that required no changing of config files or messing with existing instances of Apache, PHP, or MySQL already on my local drive.
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