A is for…

I’ve been musing on a blog post series with an alphabetical theme – along the lines of A is for… B is for… then waffling about the particular subject. I’ve got a selection of the alphabet covered in terms of things to talk about, but was struggling with ‘A’. I remembered that I’d done this sort of thing before, on another blog. I went back and dug up the old post…

Yes, it’s cheating, re-using content. I know, I know. I’ve revised the content, so some of it is new.

I asked the twitter hiveMind and blog readers for suggestions and I got an… interesting set of responses (I would expect nothing less, mind you). I decided to play along and write something (anything!) about each…

Aardvark
Relatively easy one this – a while back I bought the domain flyingaardvark.com, though I’ve still not decided quite what do do with it. I go through phases of buying domains – I’ve owned, in no particular order:
dakegra.net and .com
flyingaardvark.com
splorfle.com
webzerk.com
and now, espressococo.com. One day I might even pluck up the $13 to change espressococo.wordpress.com over to espressococo.com. One day. Perhaps I should set up a donations bucket.

I’m open to suggestions for what I might be able to do with any/all of the above. 🙂

Advice
I suppose that I was asking for Advice on what to do this post on, which is what I got!

Armadillos
Armadillos are cute. Especially baby ones. I think it’s the ears.

photo courtesy of danvas on Flickr. I hope I’ve read the CC licensing correctly!

Attentive antelope assassins, and advanced aerobatics
I can just see a bunch of black-clad ninja antelopes, cartwheeling through a high-tech lair past the traditional mesh of laser trip-wires. Actually, Ed has several books which feature either a set of super-intelligent time-travelling cows, or dinosaurs which fly spaceships. Perhaps ninja antelopes could be the Next Big Thing?

Awkward
Felt slightly awkward asking for help with this blog post, and for re-using the old blog post. Does that count?

Ad-hoc solution
… which is what this is. ’nuff said.

ADHD
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. I’m fairly sure that I have a mild form of ADHD, without the H. P will be for Procrastination, I’m sure. Watch this spa… ooh, shiny things!

Annotated
I like annotating things^[1]. Footnotes are awesome.

Asynchronous
Hmm. Had to look this one up. Asynchronous. Not really sure I’m any the wiser, to be honest. I quite like the word Plesiochronous though, which is derived from the Greek plesio, meaning near, and chronos, time, and refers to the fact that plesiochronous systems run in a state where different parts of the system are almost, but not quite perfectly, synchronised.

It’s the ‘almost, but not quite’ bit that tickles me.

Addlepated
Had to look this one up too, though wikipedia let me down. According to thefreedictionary.com:

ad·dle·pat·ed
adj.
1. Befuddled; confused.
2. Eccentric; peculiar
3. Senseless; mad

10 bonus points and a gold star if you can work it into a conversation today.

Agoraphobic
Fear of public places or open spaces. Not something I suffer from, thankfully. Though I do know a couple of people who do.

Apathy
yeah, whatever whatever.

Argyle
Assuming we’re talking about Argyll in Scotland, it’s a beautiful bit of the country. Various other uses exist though, the most familiar of which (to me, at least) is the argyle pattern of knitwear. I used to have several pairs of argyle socks, many years ago. See, don’t you feel better for knowing that?

Adams, Douglas
Famous for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, naturally. Wikipedia seems to be a modern-day version of The Guide, which when coupled with a smartphone or tablet will be virtually indistinguisable. Except The Guide in the TV series had cooler graphics. Which were all hand-drawn animation, I seem to recall.

My work desks over the years have, without exception, sported a jaunty yellow post-it note with the words Don’t Panic in large, friendly letters. And yes, I do know where my towel is.

I was looking for a suitable quote to go in here, then realised that you might as well just go and read the books. Certainly read H2G2, you could probably give the later ones a miss.

One quote which I did rather like is

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

And, on that note, we leave the letter A. Next up, B.

B is for…?

^[1] like this^[2]
[2] or this^[3]
[3] sometimes it gets silly. 🙂 However, I *love* footnotes. You’ll see a lot of them on here, best get used to them.