Pete Ashton's Weblog

Chicken Soup is rather remarkable. Especially when combined with the restorative powers of DISCO!!!

More tips are welcome. I seriously need to start kicking this now and my diet has reached a nadir.

Also remember it takes a hell of a lot of effort to make toast right now.

And just for the hell of it

That's better. Normal service will now be resumed.

All taken from the legendary cats page.

As I was putting together that previous masterpiece of bloggery (and yes, such things are crafted with great care in the Ashton Garret, lest you think I just throw these things out on a whim) I decided an illustration was in order. Not having a prawn sandwich to hand I turned to Google, as one often does in these situations, for help and there in the first few results was the perfect image. So I nabbed it, drew a crude red circle and line over it and uploaded the results.

Now, that photo isn't actually of a prawn sandwich. It's a photo of a plastic replica of a prawn sandwich produced by a company called, logically enough, Replica who "create theatre in the retail environment and provide hyper-realistic food models for health education and drama". So not only is the photograph somebody's work, the subject of the photograph is also somebody else's work. Both of them are covered under copyright. Which I broke.

And here's the thing. If I'd reproduced the image as is and labeled it as a neat photo of a fake sandwich then I'd be very guilty of copyright infringement as I do not have the right to copy that image. But I didn't care too hoots about the fakeness of the sandwich and wasn't that bothered about the merits of the photograph (which, to be frank, needed a bit of work to get the colour balance right). All I wanted was an icon that represented a prawn sandwich, something that, when you saw it, you'd think "prawn sandwich". To me there was no real difference between my putting the words "prawn" and "sandwich" in a red circle with a line through it and using a photo, except maybe the photo was funnier.

Yes, I'm still guilty of copyright infringement and probably some other stuff but I consider it a lesser crime because my intentions were different. Or to put it another way, if I had reproduced the image as I found it I'd have felt obliged to credit the site I found it on. Having assimilated it into my own work that obligation somehow vanished.

Sticking with photography, a tangental example illuminates. If you take a photograph of someone where they fill the frame you need a model release in order to commercially use that photo. (Okay, not legally in this country but it's good form, especially if you want to sell worldwide.) If, however, you take a photo of a crowd and someone happens to be in that photo then you don't have to bother getting them to sign a piece of paper no matter how identifiable they are because the photo isn't about them. There are degrees and at some point the rights shrink away into meaninglessness.

I should point out that I don't take any glee from infringing on the rights of plastic food manufacturers nor their photographers. It just struck me, as I was failing to get to sleep, that I'd somehow crossed a line where I would no longer respect their rights and I found that interesting. And I, perhaps foolishly, thought you might find it interesting too.

(And if you're wondering, yes, this post is very meta.)

I'm not the sort of mook who cries foul whenever BBC gives undue prominence to a story they don't think worthwhile and I do accept that hundreds of cars mysteriously breaking down after using fuel from a number of specific petrol stations is a fascinating story, but the BBC news site currently has three, count them, three stories on it's front page about this. Here's a screenshot if they've come to their senses by the time you read this.

The main news item today is Petrol retailers say fuel is safe. In the Features, Views, Analysis box is Driver Fury - Anger as motorists hit by wave of 'contaminated' fuel. Meanwhile over on the right under Have Your Say there's Have you been sold 'contaminated' fuel?. The Driver Fury piece is actually linked to twice on the same page (with different titles), also coming under the main news piece along with an unrelated story about oil prices falling. You can also watch a statement from a Tesco spokesperson. Then in the Most Read box two of these stories appear again.

All of this linked to directly from the main BBC news page.

Can you spell overkill?

First of all, here's my solution for dealing with road traffic congestion. On any given road where congestion is occurring every other car with a single occupant should be removed from the road and crushed. The owner would then be given a bike and bus/rail pass as compensation. I envisage some kind of large helicopter with a big claw picking the cars straight off the road for immediate disposal though I appreciate this might not be feasible.

I also think speed cameras should be replaced with a giant mallet that swings down on the offender flattening them and their car into the tarmac. Or perhaps a trap door in the road that drops them into a fiery pit of fiery fire.

With my stance on this issue clear, I find myself wanting to comment on The Great Petition. While single-issue petitions don't really mean shit in the wider scheme of things, especially ones that are hyped by the Daily Express, this has resulted in possibly the most intelligent thing to come out of Tony Blair's office in the last ten years. This email is long. It has sentences that are not sound-bites. It covers many points of view. It is, above all, quite calm and lacking in hyperbole. It's in the sort of reasoned, level-headed voice you wish governments would use on a daily basis.

That's not to say I believe him or anything. The motorists lobby is strong enough to force a climb-down on this not to mention the whipping he's been getting from the reactionary tabloids. And the "big brother" issues are serious, regardless of who's collecting the data.

But road pricing is a sensible move. After all, it costs me twice as much to travel by train at peak hours so I tend not to. Why should motorists be excluded from this sensible approach to dealing with transport capacity is beyond me.

So Tony, why did you wait until now before treating your subjects like intelligent human beings?

It's become something of an internet truth that the comments on popular YouTube videos represent the nadir of cesspit online dialogue but while scrolling down to escape this video of Celine Dion singing AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long (via) it occurred to me this is a real indicator of the reach YouTube has these days. It's not that comments like "u shud all shut the fuck up its wikid i fink its a realy gud version if they wer all the same as the originals it wudnt b different x" are unique to YouTube but it's quite rare for the likes of us to share a service not just with someone who writes like that but who actually likes Celine Dion. YouTube is the great bridge across the niche divide and while it's not pretty maybe there's something to celebrate there. Maybe.

Interesting article on Comment is Free this morning. The Pirates' Code, by one Ned Beauman, tries to figure out why stuff gets pirated in the first place when there's no financial reward. For example, recording, editing and encoding TV shows so they can be distributed by BitTorrent within hours of broadcast or risking their jobs by leaking preview copies of albums and movies. He notes the somewhat bizarre news that torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay, which recently formed its own political party in Sweden, is planning to buy the legendary micronation Sealand off the Suffolk coast. But the real question is what motivates the thousands of others who make it so easy for the likes of us to get stuff from the big media companies in the first place?

This has puzzled me too. I figured out a while back that there are online communities (warez groups) who rip and encode stuff to agreed standards but why they made their word available to everyone outside their gangs remained a mystery.

Beauman reckons it's indicative of a general disillusionment with the mediocrity of the entertainment industry, which might seem a little odd given they're spending their time distributing stuff they apparently don't like. If you're sick of seeing endless shite movies being released why would you risk prosecution by pirating them? "They want to strike back against this regime of mediocrity in the only way they can. The executives from the film studios and the record labels treat them like drooling cattle, and they want to prove that they're not." In other words, by releasing Hollywood stuff for free the pirate is helping to bankrupt Hollywood, stripping its power away and forcing it to take notice that its customers don't respect it anymore, if they ever did.

It's stretching things a bit, certainly, but there's a grain of truth in there. I recently bought a couple of DVD box sets for the first time in my life, seasons 1 and 2 of The Wire. I could have downloaded them but, having sampled season 3 illegally and being blown away by it, I decided I wanted to support this sort of TV in the hope that, however small my actions, it might go some way to encouraging less of the shit and more of the quality. Despite having downloaded and watched seasons 3 and 4 I intend to also buy those box sets when they come out, partly for the quality (the leaked episodes of season 4 are a bit ropey) but again because I want to thank them financially. Buying stuff has become something of a political act, culturally speaking. Same goes for my eMusic subscription - I'll pay for the music I respect on terms that don't insult me even though I can probably get it for free somewhere else. The only language these people understand is money so I shall talk to them in that language.

Interestingly this attitude reminded me of Decadent Action, a slightly tongue in cheek counter culture movement from the 1990s that reasoned the best way to overthrow capitalism was by having everyone spend beyond their means.

"We use the simple economic principles of supply and demand with their intrinsic link to inflation to establish our theories. The state must control these factors to run the economy efficiently; throw in the wild card of massive irrational overspending on seemingly random luxury goods and the government is unable to take control. This will lead to hyper inflation and large scale social unrest, leading to the collapse of the monetary system and disintegration of the state apparatus."

Piracy - it's not theft, it's a political act intended to overthrow the cultural hegemony of a morally bankrupt entertainment industry.

Or not.

It's been a while since the last Tea News so thanks to Groc for alerting me to the shocking news that adding milk to tea makes it less healthy.

Tea, as you may know, is good for you. This is because it's tea and tea is great. (There's some science stuff too but that's beside the point. Tea is great. End of story.) However, according to the European Heart Journal the casein protein found in milk block the bits of tea that help prevent heart disease.

They studied the effect on 16 humans and a bunch of rat tissue. So that's conclusive then.

Naturally there's a lot of debate about this as you'd expect for something of such great importance. While I'm a great advocate of tea's inherent superiority to (blech!) coffee I fully support any investigations into the virtues of tea if only to back up it's greatness. That said I have some comments on this.

Firstly, the drinking of tea is usually accompanied by biscuits or cake. The health benefits of biscuits and cake are not widely held to be high.

Secondly health is usually not high on people's minds when drinking tea. What they're usually thinking is "I really need a cup of tea right now" not "Time for a dose of anti heart disease medication".

Thirdly, if you want healthy tea you're probably better off with a nice green tea rather than the standard Red Label variety. Regardless of your position on milk in brown tea you'd have to be mad to put the white in the green. (Little known fact - green tea has caffeine in it too so it counts as proper tea unlike, say, elderberry tea or some other abortion.)

Fourthly, a cigarette smoked with tea (which after beer is the best way to smoke one) kinda blows this health stuff out of the water to begin with, though I accept this is a declining phenomena.

In conclusion then, as so often happens when scientists research tea, as you were.

This morning, as we surveyed the start of what looks to be a significantly extended period of fog, Andy asked me if I knew what the difference was between fog and mist was. Pausing for a moment I had to conclude that I didn't and had never really considered the possibility that they were distinct things. After some random speculation that fog was very low clouds while mist, um, probably wasn't wasn't I said I'd look it up and get back to him.

In a satisfyingly long entry Wikipedia confirms that fog is "a cloud in contact with the ground". However, the entry for mist is somewhat on the scrappy side and, alongside defining it as "a phenomenon of small droplets suspended in air", states that "the only difference between mist and fog is visibility". The implication is that mist can be created from a number of sources, such as a fine spray of water from a hose or steam from a sauna whereas fog can only be formed as clouds are formed, in other words by the weather.

So, to summarise...

If it's a real pea souper and you can't see shit, it's foggy.

If there's a lot of moisture in the air but you can still see a reasonable distance, it's misty.

It can be misty if there aren't any clouds in the air should you be in an environment where cold air is warming up, ie at dawn. Or standing next to a boiling kettle in a cold room.

Mist can be caused by low hanging clouds but they'll be really wimpy ones. If they've got any substance to them of worth then it'll be fog.

You're welcome.

We recently installed a stool in the bathroom. Actually, given how crowded this flat is with stuff it was more like found a place for the stool in the bathroom, but the end result is said stool has proven very useful for leaving things on, specifically reading material for those extended sessions on the lavatory. However, given that the shower is also in the room and the ventilation, while sufficient, is not that great, leaving books of any value in there is a no-no. I started leaving the Guardian's Saturday magazine in there but other than the main couple of articles it doesn't have the substance to last the week. What I really want is a meaty magazine full of the sort of articles I'm not inclined to read off the screen. I guess I could print out a load but in reality I'm not going to do that regularly (and I don't have any ink in my printer right now).

So here's a request. What article-based magazines would you recommend I check out? I'm thinking along the lines of the New Yorker - regular, not overly expensive, intelligent and wide ranging in content. Literary in style but not specifically about literature. Any suggestions?

[Update: Sorted. It's Cliff Laine with an i, which is why I couldn't find him. Sigh... Thanks TD.]

I have a terrible, atrocious memory for names. I've also been involved in various things where I meet a lot of people, who tell me their names, which I then promptly forget. This also leads to me looking at names I scribbled down or numbers entered in my mobile or change of address emails and thinking "who the hell is this person?" And it's faintly embarrassing, especially if the person knows who I am. It's not that I think I'm superior or anything. I just have fucking awful memory for names.

With that in mind, I was thinking it was about time I finally contacted those lovely people who donated hard solid cash for my Going Deaf for a Fortnight project last year to send them a complimentary photographic print. (The fabled zine is still not done and, frankly, probably never will be.) Down at the bottom of the list is the name Cliff Lane.

I stare at the name.

I search through my emails.

I check my PayPal receipts.

I search through the comments on the blog.

I google him.

I stare at the name.

Who the hell is Cliff Lane?

If you're Cliff Lane, please get in touch. If you know a Cliff Lane who might be the Cliff Lane I'm looking for, please let him know. There's the promise of a print with his name on it.

This is all so embarrassing...

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In related news, it's nine days till Russ L starts GDFAF 2006.

I'm pretty pleased with my eBay feedback While it may be a modest 116 it's the quality of that counts. Like most good eBayers I take it very seriously and do all I can to avoid anything other than a positive rating. It's all part of the game - I must maintain 100% at all costs.

And so, thanks to my going the extra mile or two, my feedback has a tendency to glow.

"fan bloody tastic,top seller,well pleased,quick delivery,superb.10/10"

"amazing seller! Honestly, he was quick to respond and very patient. Kudos"

And then, sitting there after the sale of an Iain Sinclair hardback, is this gem:

"fine"

It's weird how something so minimal, so non-commital, can get under your skin. Every time I see it there it burns into my eyes. What does "fine" mean?

So I figured I'd check his feedback left for others and see what he usually said. As you'll see (unless you're reading this in the future and he's suddenly gone all verbose) most of them are "fine", which made me feel better, but scroll down and some variations in feedback occur. "Good" makes a few appearances, along with "OK". Go back a year and "very good" pops up a couple of times along with a rather startling "FINE" in caps.

I accept I'm reading far too much into this but when you're given bugger all you tend to do that, so I have to ponder, what is the difference between "fine" and "good", not to mention "ok"? They're all positive, apparently, but do they sit on a scale of positivity? You might think "good" is better than "fine", but in the world of collectable stuff "fine" is actually a higher grade than "good" (or even "very good") which actually means kinda shabby. Is he using this nerd scale of judgement? Should I be very happy with my "fine"?

I could, of course, message the chap and ask him. But that would be taking things a little too far. I mean, I don't want to get obsessive about this or anything.

My review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest at the Waterside Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon on Saturday 5th August 2006 staring Patrick Stewart as Prospero.

Meh.

Okay, Julian Bleach as Ariel was good, but I later discovered he was one of the key players behind the wonderful Shockheaded Peter so that was no surprise.

To be honest, I fell asleep in the middle of the first half.

Everyone else seemed to like it though.

Tax rebate came though. I've just ordered a Nikon D70s camera. Eek.

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Anyone want to buy a Fuji Finepix S7000? One careful owner?

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Still working for Nat, currently painting the fence green though there's more digging to follow. I'm thinking of moving into their shed if I can rig up an ethernet cable.

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Shaved my head, which involved sitting in front of a mirror with my shirt off (not something I do very often), and discovered I have muscle tone, specifically around the upper torso and shoulders. Was somewhat taken aback by this. Combined with my working-man's-tan I believe I might possibly be "buff". Whodathunkit?

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No I'm not going to post a photo.

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Meg moved to WordPress (and broke her RSS feed in the process) mainly for the ease of using the Themes system and not having to worry about template coding and CSS so she can just get on with the content part of the CMS. Part of me agrees (there's a new version of MT out and I've got no real inclination to download it let alone upgrade) but part of me is screaming "DIY! DIY!" That latter part might have to grow up, I dunno. I still have a dislike for off the shelf templates but despite growing tired of the current look for this site I really can't face another redesign from scratch. Maybe I should just go plain text and be damned.

Hmm... That's not a bad idea...

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The Wire is a superior TV series that I urge you to seek out.

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Thank fuck for the rain!

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Caption, the small press comics convention in Oxford, is next weekend. For the first time in over a decade I may not go. This is nothing to do with Caption so please don't read anything into it as I'm sure it'll be superb. Then again I may go at the last minute. We'll see.

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You'll have noticed a lack of new photos in the last week. The films from Supersonic haven't come back yet and I think I'm having a break, which is probably no bad thing.

Chap called Christopher Cox sent me a nice email about the blog and asked a question.

"Say, I know this is a strange query, but if you don't mind my asking, would you possibly be able to tell me what people are generally like in the UK, compared with the United States (where I live)? I've been thinking of shifting locations to Britain (I love the climate, plus the people are undoubtedly more educated!), but I've been curious what the people are actually like, in general. The Brits are often said to be more polite and helpful than Americans on average; are they typically quite proper and formal, or are they often rather more casual, loud, and goofy? Do strangers often chat, or is quiet and reserve usually preferred?"

My answer would be "well, they're kinda British" which isn't much use, so in a rare moment of community involvement on this blog I figured I'd throw it open to my predominantly British readership.

So, what are we like?

On my journey to work there's a rather steep hill which appears just as I'm getting to my destination in a most annoying fashion, but the thing about hills is while they're a bitch to go up they're triffic on the way down. This particular one also has a slight bend it in and not much traffic so speeding down it in top gear with my peddling failing to gain traction is great fun with the added bonus of being able to take the subsequent not-so-steep hill without changing down. There's something very rewarding about getting to the top of a slope and realising you're still in maximum gear rather than having had to click down.

But today, as I began my descent, a strong gust of wind hit my body slowing me down. While it did mean I didn't make the next hill in top gear it wasn't the end of the world, but it did get me thinking, not for the first time, about that bane of the all-weather cyclist - the wind.

What is it with wind anyway?

Sure, I understand the basic principles involved - that warm air rises causing cold air to rush in and fill the gap, hence wind - but what gets me is how something strong enough to physically move massive objects can be invisible.

Of course, air has form, being made up of, primarily, Nitrogen and Oxygen atoms, and it's these, when put under pressure, which are slowing me down. I get all that. I just can't get my head around the fact that I can't see it.

If you get hit by a thing with a significant amount of force you'd expect to be able to look at that thing, but one of the most powerful manifestations of energy around is completely, utterly invisible to the human eye.

It sure do weird me out.

In lieu of writing about my interesting life and shockingly well thought out opinions, here are some lambs.

I will endeavour to write something vaguely intelligible, if not actually intelligent, tomorrow, but right now I fear the combination of chocolate, fresh air and beer has rather done me in.

Three posts in one day! Let's make it four.

"Go to Wikipedia and put in your birth date. Don't put in the year. Post in your LJ blog with three neat/important events, two births, and two deaths!"

19th September

Events
1945 - Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) sentenced to death in London.
1978 - Newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater is shot dead after disturbing burglars at a farm, leading to famous murder trial.
2001 - Commencement of combatant activities in Afghanistan

Births
86 - Antoninus Pius, Roman Emperor
1941 - Mama Cass Elliot, American musician

Deaths
1942 - Condé Nast, American publisher
1985 - Italo Calvino, Italian writer

I also share a birthday with Hermione Granger of the Harold Potter novels which is quite LJ-tastic and something I wasn't previously aware of.

Snarfed from Steve

I've been invading the nocturnal fantasies of Woodrow Phoenix, cartoonist and creative mind of greatness (and designer of one of my favourite fonts):

"Last night I dreamt that we were living in the same house. And you had a new business. I can't remember what it was engaged in, but I was, naturally, giving you a hand with your corporate identity. The logo was a blocky pixelart rendition of a dog's head and the name was some kind of riff on Flintstones. Later on I went for a walk in the park and saw that you had taken over this large disused factory to sell paintings and original artwork created by comics artists and small pressers generally. Weirdly, Gosh! comics had also caught onto this idea and opened another shop directly in front of yours to compete with you. I went in there first, since it was in front of you [their plan was working!] and saw they were projecting work onto a wall so people could decide which drawings/paintings they wanted to buy. But the staff were very bad at advising people so I knew they would fail."

If you've caught me manipulating your dreams do feel free to let me know.

I've long had a liking for badges. This is not an unusual passion and I've been content to just graze around picking them up here and there. Recently I've been thinking about making my own, bringing in some of my more design-happy friends as well as myself, and selling them.

There seem to be two options. Firstly I could outsource it to one of the many badge companies out there. Best Badges come recommended and their prices are reasonable, starting at £25 for 100. The problem is that's one design and I'd be more interested in doing lots of short-runs ending up with a tub of madness for people to shuffle through.

The other option is to get my own badge making machine. There are cheap ones on the market but I'm not convinced of the quality so I'd be looking to get a nice industrial looking one like in the picture here. A check on eBay puts the 25mm ones at about £75 though I can't find any suppliers of the raw badges themselves. I guess some kind of monster craft shop would do them in bulk, assuming there aren't compatibility issues. On top of this is the issue of printing out the designs. Inkjet isn't any use (rain) so it'll have to be colour laser which I'm guessing can be done at your standard reprographics store. All in all I think we're looking at a good £100-125 outlay meaning I'd have to sell 250 or so badges at 50p each to break even.

Why am I telling you this? Well, there's a good chance someone might have an old badge maker in their cupboard or know of a good supplier for this kind of thing. The comments box is yours.

1) I have a job for the next 6-8 weeks. It's only four hours a day (9am - 1pm) but the pay rate is good and it's in Northfield / Longbridge so I can cycle there. In theory this should cover all my bills, give me some stability and a nice start to each day and leave me plenty of time to do other things.

2) Blueyonder finally upgraded the broadband in Birmingham so I'm now cruising at 4mb with uploads at 40kb. This should keep me content for at least six months!

3) It's a lovely day!

Please bear in mind that my reviewing TV is a little like a vegan reviewing bacon but I watched some TV and wish to review it.

Everybody Hates Chris is an American import shown on Five on Sunday nights. It's based on the childhood reminiscences of Chris Rock growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1980s. While I don't know much about Rock, Brooklyn crops up in a lot of the books I like so, prompted by a good write up in Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column, I determined to check it out. And thanks to Andy and Alex also wanting to watch it I didn't get distracted and forget.

It's very good. The humour is direct but surprisingly subtle, the characters rounded yet archetypal, the messages clear but never preachy and it has those nice magical-realism-esque snippets of daydream and fantasy that often crop up in quality American comedies and dramas, though I can't think of any off-hand. It is good autobiography and I recommend it. Here be torrents.

After that A&A flipped over to watch the third episode of Planet Earth, Freshwater. A little of the hype for this flagship BBC nature programme had seeped into my consciousness and so I stuck around. I was quite disappointed. While it looked stunning the speed with which it darted from one fascinating thing to another meant actually learning anything was impossible. Not only that, by jumping around the world any context for the animals shown was lost, other than they live in water that is fresh. Added to this the insistence on showing us things never seen before combined with this desire to do so really quickly and just dwell on the pretty pictures and dramatic slow-mo bred a terrible cynicism in me. Freshwater dolphins? Two foot long salamanders (at least I think they were - it went by so fast) in mountain rapids? They're making this shit up, I ventured. It may have taken three years to make but so does a Pixar movie.

Planet Earth, while by no means the sole culprit, demonstrates what's wrong with mass-audience broadcast TV and why it must die. There's no depth here, just spectacle that gives the illusion of education and value. If it was honest and announced itself as spectacle that would be fine but this bogus parading as being of some tangible worth the intellectual development of society just stinks. And it's a terrible waste of some great camerawork (if in fact it is camerawork and not digitally created - the "making of" mini-doc afterwards did come across as protesting a little too much...)

Monday evening and I enter the living room to be greeted by a posh man in Cambodia. Around the World in 80 Treasures has passion and depth, dwelling long on the details and putting out some interesting ideas and questions. There was plenty of awe and spectacle but it was grounded with knowledge and the desire to impart it. Tellingly it's on BBC2 at 7pm and there's no dedicated page on the BBC site. Wikipedia fills the gap with many links to information about said treasures. Did you not see there was a gap there, BBC? Or were you too busy with your dumb shiny Planet Earth toy?

After that was a trailer for some programme where Cilla Black reminisces about the food that has played an important part in her eventful life. I shit you not.

* * * * *

I'm mildly tempted to do this more often. Any suggestions for programmes you'd like me to cast my eye over?

I made one of my rare sojourns into the living room this evening to eat my dinner to discover Dr Zoop was watching the football, which always strikes me as odd in a good way. I like it when people confound my preconceptions about them and seeing this gentle, thoughtful hippy get enthused about football does just that.

I don't mind football as a spectator sport, in moderation, say once every couple of years when there's some kind of international competition going on and you get to see some quite exciting acrobatics on the pitch, but the over-inflated hyperbole surrounding the game drives me batty, especially as having an opinion about it required you to be interminably stupid.

But, like I said, I don't mind watching it so I settled down in the sofa for the rest of what turned out to be a very dull match. Finally a goal was scored and I was struck my the way the broadcaster put together the replay. Within seconds they had four camera angles edited into rapid sequence with slow-mo for the dramatic bits. It was the sort of thing you'd expect to take a good couple of hours in a professional studio but it was there on screen in moments.

I wonder how they do it? If it's one guy then it's an incredible show of skill, and if it's a large team then it's an incredible piece of management. Not to mention that they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs for 80 minutes and then had a few seconds notice before diving into action.

I'd really like to know the behind the scenes on this.

The conversation meanders into the subject of clashing personalities, specifically the difference between people who know exactly what they like and don't like and have strident opinions about stuff and those who prefer to take the balanced view, seeing all sides and pondering the grey areas. Put these two sorts of people together and it can all get a bit clashy

My brain ticks over and an analogy begins to form.

It's like horses.

When they're wearing blinkers they march in a straight line oblivious to anything around them, but they get to their destination quickly and efficiently. Without blinkers they meander about the place, looking for interesting stuff off the beaten tracks. Sometimes blinkers are good, sometimes not having blinkers is good.

Yes, I know I can be insufferable at times...

If you go to a gig and have a look at the back of the stage you can be sure to find an amp sitting atop a beer crate. This is the law. What's interesting (if that's in any way the right word) is that there's a damn good chance that beer crate will be yellow and have "Holsten" written on the side. Except the pub doesn't sell Holsten and probably hasn't since the 1980s.

Since I first spotted this in one of my photos I've been seeing them everywhere and it's probably time to start recording them in one place. Maybe this'll turn into a whole 'nother blog celebrating the wonder of the Holsten crate and its amp-supporting genius. Who can tell?

Here's one, and here's another. I shall add more as I find them, as can you in the comments for this post.

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Here's another one - not an amp but the context is right.

I meant to mark this but never got around to doing so, so here goes.

A couple of weeks ago I attained the age of 33.333333 years. I am now a third of the way to a hundred.

Which of course means nothing, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Here's an idea for thing.

I often work late at night when my flatmates are asleep. I like to have music on but I don't want to disturb them. Headphones are one option but not particularly comfortable for extended periods, especially when I just want background music, so I usually keep the volume down very low indeed, and then as the night progresses and I get more attuned to the silence outside I turn it down further until I might as well not be listening to music at all.

What I'd like is a monitor that sits outside my door and listens out for my music. It's connected to the computer so it knows what to listen for and should any noises match the patterns coming from my speakers it automatically turns the volume down (at the same time ignoring my flatmates when they go to the loo or something). That way I can have my tunes at an audible volume and be safe in the knowledge that I'm not disturbing anyone else.

I expect to see this in the shops by Christmas.

Ooh, it's a meme, this time from Meg who had a special request for the first one.

Forty Four (or so) jobs I've had (roughly in order since 1989):

• Assistant, Chemist Counter, Boots, Saturdays
  
• Building site labourer
  
• Toiletries factory staffed predominately by middle aged women "with mattresses strapped to their backs".
  
• Bookseller - Hatchards, Winchester (Xmas temp)
  
• Bookseller - Athena Bookshop, Southampton
  
• Bookseller, Dillons, Winchester
  
• Reprographics assistant, Mail Boxes Etc, University of Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Dillons, Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Cheapside, London
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Charing Cross Road, London
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Leadenhall Market, London
  
• Labourer, Organic Farm, Isle of Wight
  
• Food prep, Kitchen, Otterbourne
  
• Chambermaid, Winchester
  
• Cable Puller's Mate, Winchester
  
• Refuse Collector, Banbury
  
• Car factory, Banbury
  
• Office drone, Airline, Birmingham
  
• Cold-store warehouse, Thatcham
  
• Box lugging, Rubery
  
• Mail room, Bank, Birmingham
  
• Building a fake house, NEC, Birmingham
  
• Fly-tip clearing and litter picker, Birmingham (all Birmingham from here-on)
  
• Delivery driver's mate
  
• Tampon Factory
  
• Giant Otter, sea Life Centre
  
• Marshall, Bike marathon
  
• Pharmacy Stores, QE Hospital
  
• Quality Control, car factory
  
• Production line, car factory
  
• Catalogue warehouse
  
• Dog food warehouse
  
• Assembling large metal doors for lockups
  
• Tyre warehouse
  
• Quality control, Landrover
  
• Inspecting doodads for excess solder
  
• Leaflet delivery
  
• Self-employed website designer
  
• Odd job man (mainly garden work)
  
• Office job phoning people to see if they're dead or not.
  
• "Fine art" dispatch warehouse
  
• Car park attendant
  
• Parcel courier depot
  
• And many more that I've forgotten about or didn't blog at the time...

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Casablanca
• Gross Point Blank
• Blazing Saddles
• god, I dunno... I'm kinda stuck here...

Four places I've lived:

• Singapore (1973-1979)
• Croydon (1985-1989)
• Winchester/Eastleigh (1989-1995)
• Birmingham (1995-2000, 2003-date)

Four TV shows I love (though I don't actually watch TV...):

• Battlestar Galactica (So much better than it should be)
• Buffy/Angel/Firefly (DVD box sets in one sitting)
• Spaced (if a little too close to home...)
• The Crow Road

Four places I've been to on holiday:

• Fuji (some time in the 70s during a typhoon)
• West Texas
• Guernsey
• Robin Hood's Bay

Four of my favorite dishes:

• Fried Breakfast in a Cafe
• Peanut Butter sandwich (optional extras: Chocolate Spread or Banana)
• Christmas dinner with all the trimmings
• A raw vegan meal prepared by my mate Helen that didn't look like much but which was delicious and filled me right up.

Four sites I visit daily:

• Guardian
• Wikipedia
• Flickr
• MySpace (for my sins...)

Four places I would rather be right now:

• Here in the summer
• Visiting my mates Dave and Ruth and their babies in Alyesbury
• Up a mountain with a thermos of tea
• In a field with a shovel and instructions to dig a big hole for no readily apparent reason.

Four bloggers I am tagging (though they shouldn't feel obliged or anything):

• Steve M
• Anna Mondo
• BSE *bing!*
• Ben Silentwords *bing!*

Gordon says (in a comment to this post) that he hates smokers who "waste about an hour each day on 'fag breaks'" which is fair enough. I can imagine non-smokers would get pretty narked as their smoking colleagues pop outside willy nilly while they're stuck chained to their desks. But, unsurprising as this may be, I think fag breaks are a good thing. In fact I think everyone, smoker or not, should take them.

When you remove the actual smoking of the cigarette a fag break is simply standing still doing nothing for five minutes in a non-working environment. You are actively putting yourself in a position where you cannot be interrupted by the phone, email or other distractions and so your mind is able to relax and settle. Then when you return to work you are refreshed and able to do your work better. H&S guidelines say you should spend a few minutes every hour away from a computer to avoid eye strain and RSI so why not apply this to the brain? Makes sense to me.

In my brief flirtation with management a few years ago (which I actually enjoyed and in the process discovered saying "please" and "thank you" meant people happily did what I asked them to do) I used to encourage the non-smokers to pop outside for five minutes if they were getting stressed. Those few that took me up on it said it worked for them.

On the flipside, I was recently working in an office where I had to deduct my fag breaks from the mandatory half-hour lunch. In other words people in this office were expected to stay at their desks continuously for four hours at a time. It was a miserable job, even by office standards, but I noticed that the other employees (non-smokers the lot) had evolved their own tricks to detach from the work mindset which I'm sure if you added it up "wasted" more time than I would have done popping out for a fag every hour or so.

(And for the record, no, I don't need to smoke every hour at work - I just need to get out of there and remind myself I'm alive. The smoking is more an excuse than anything else.)

Interesting, if completely understandable, discovery this evening. If you cycle in sub-zero temperatures with slightly sweaty feet while wearing steel-toecapped boots, your toes will get very very cold indeed.

1881 on the left, 1998 on the right. Not a Brummie name after all then...

Check yours on the Surname profiler.

A few years ago I was listening to some Sunday morning Radio 1 show with some DJ or other being all Sunday morning and chatty about nothing in particular and he asked his listeners a rhetorical question. Why, he asked, does my towel smell? His confusion lay in the sequence of events that lead to the use of his towel, principally that he showers, thus removing any bad smell from his body before it comes into contact with the towel. If he's removing smell-related things in this process why after a week or so does the towel begin to smell?

I took one look at the radio muttering something like "well that's fucking obvious" and continued with whatever it was I was doing but the unanswered question stayed with me. For years. Every time I wash my smelly towel, and frequently when I just look at a towel, the voice of this DJ hovers wafts through my brain. I mean. this must have been at least three years ago as I haven't listened to Sunday morning Radio 1 for longer than that, but there he is, glorying in his cult-of-stupid chit-chat about smelly towels and there's nothing I can do about it.

Except maybe if I blog the answer loud enough perhaps this phantom will hear and leave me alone. So, Mr DJ, the reason your towel smells is as follows. When you dry your body you rub tiny flakes of skin onto the towel. These then sit on the towel and, since the towel is wet, they go mouldy. After a week or so this will begin to smell. You can increase the time before smelling will occur by rapidly drying your towel, say on a radiator or by hanging it outside on a sunny day, and not storing it folded in a frequently damp place such as your shower room. I would assume that vigorously shaking the dry towel to dislodge any dead skin would help but to be honest haven't tested this. Actually, I've not tested any of this - it's just fucking obvious.

In lieu of any actual weblog content of insight and intellectual value I present you with a photograph of my toe.

Actually, I've been meaning to do this for a while. When I was moving out of the house in Kingstanding back in May I had to rebuild the fitted wardrobe in my room - essentially hanging the heavy floor-to-ceiling sliding doors back up. The doors were down because, being cheap and shit, they didn't slide, but for the sake of the deposit they had to go back.

I did this job wearing slippers. My brain assumed I was wearing steel toecapped boots. I wound up with a black toenail.

And now, seven months later, that blackness has very nearly grown away. I was going to wait until it had completely gone but an absence of black toenail does not a good photo make.

So from now on my habitation shall be measured in terms of toenails, specifically those belonging to the big toe. In June 2006 I shall have been in Bournville for 2 BTNs, January 2007 will be 3 BTNs, and so on.

I didn't think this Going Deaf For A Fortnight thing through. To which every responds "You think?" And so I elaborate.

I knew this is going to be a tough thing mentally and physically and I was prepared for that. I'm not working for this fortnight so I can do the writeups properly and get a reasonable amount of rest but even so this project is taking up nearly all my waking hours. I leave for the gig about seven, get back around midnight, spent four hours or so writing it up usually getting to sleep around six am and then, on waking, figure out where I'm going to next. It's become a full time job. Which is not a problem - I quite like intensity of it all and at the very least hope my writing improves under the pressure.

But what I didn't think through was the money side. When I first had the idea I figured most gigs would cost three or four quid to get in. It's looking more like seven or eight quite often rising to ten. This wouldn't be a big deal if I was going to one a week, but with a gig every night they're starting to add up. I'm cycling to the gigs as much as possible (looks a bit wet tonight) and not drinking to keep the costs down but even allowing for that I'm starting to run out of cash.

Of course, if I'd thought this through and planned everything meticulously I would have contacted the promoters and tried to blag guest list status, but I didn't and to be honest I think throwing myself at random gigs this way is more in the spirit of things, as well as forcing me to judge the performances as a paying punter.

But it costs cash and on the whole I don't have much of that.

Here, then, is a PayPal button:

[PayPal button removed]

When all this is over, and once I've regained my sanity, I will be producing a zine containing these gig reviews edited and reformatted for print. Anyone who donates over £5 will get a copy of the zine. Additionally, I'll be getting some prints made of the photos. Anyone who donates over £10 will get a reasonably sized (probably 6x8 or 8x10) print of their choosing as well as the zine. There'll also be an additional exclusive-to-donators free thing that I can't really mention here. This stuff will be sent out around December / January time.

(If you don't want to use PayPal contact me by email and we'll figure something out. And above all, don't feel obliged or nothing...)

Another silly idea for the pile. I've been thinking about portable audio recording for a number of years now for various notions most of which are lost in the midsts of my memory, but I always stalled at the hardware stage. What little research I've done seems to suggest that portable digital audio recording is either incredibly expensive and professional or rather expensive and not much better than tape, but tape only lasts for 45 minutes or so and just seems a little archaic. Ideally I just want a small memory stick, say half a gig or so, with a mic socket and a record button along with a small mic I can either clip onto my clothes or tape to my body. Recording quality doesn't have to be high as I'll just be recording myself. To give you some idea of what I'm after here's the latest notion.

I've been enjoying the Dubber and Spoons Buscast for a while now, where two chaps record their conversation on their bus home from work and slap it online, but it seems to have ground to a halt. What I liked about it, other than their good humour and repartee, was the background noise and sense of place. It reminded me of a Radio 4 program, the name of which annoyingly escapes me, where the presenter goes for a country walk with a local expert and just talks about stuff, occasionally stopping to let the sounds of the country paint an aural picture.

As you know I do a lot of cycling at the moment and when I do the endorphins get rushing around and my brain ticks over ten to the dozen. I want to strap a mic to my face and just talk. It might be a leisurely bimble around the canals or a hectic bomb through the rush-hour traffic of central Birmingham. I might give a detailed commentary or you might just get me panting and swearing at idiotic motorists. You might even get me singing as I do that sometimes - this morning it was Half Man Half Biscuit in the style of an opera diva. I sometimes get lost and have to consult a map, which gets terribly exciting I can tell you.

The other reason is after 21 episodes of Pete Radio I'm looking for a new challenge. Don't worry, I'll definitely continue to do music shows, but I feel I've gotten into something of a rut with them. It's a good rut, but a rut all the same. Audio, and speech radio in particular, has always interested me so I really should start pushing the boundaries a little.

So, anyone got any experience with budget portable audio recording kit? Is a cheap dictaphone with a stripped down mic really the best option or is there something out there that will output mp3s? To give you some idea I'd rather not spend more than £50.

Jez and I have long had a dispute over the relative merits of Zoe Williams, columnist for The Guardian, but it's recently come to a head. As ever Jez is being a stubborn arse on the matter and I know he'll never concede that her writing is at least no worse than some of the other Polly Filler writers in the broadsheet press let alone see reason and get over it. But I need some backup here because I really like her stuff. So for all you Guardian readers: Zoe Williams, a force for good or evil incarnate? Cast your votes in the comments...

"Google's rival Gmail service had created confusion and uncertainty amid potential clients of his firm, said Mr Smith."

Apparently a couple of firms who didn't register gmail.com are disputing Google's use of the term because they were using it first. Full story here (via), but what really interests me is that quote. "Confusion and uncertainty" was being created by Google's move and this is a terrible thing, for where would we be if all companies and businesses were allowed to create confusion and uncertainty all willy nilly?

Well, for a start we'd be shopping. My tax rebate came through last week and I've been doing some shopping, mainly for techy things like batteries, a USB 2.0 card, DVD-Rs, that sort of thing, and it's been a nightmare. Do I need DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs? (-Rs are preferable but I went with +Rs.) Will this USB card work in my Mac? (Yes with a 3rd party driver that the manufacturers don't link to on their site.) Is £8.99 a high price for rechargeable batteries? (Yes, but I'd bought them by the time I realised this.) These little things that shouldn't be a problem and on their own aren't really all add up to an experience not too dissimilar to a state of confusion and uncertainty.

And it's not just on the high street - online can be just as bad. Having spent an age tunneling though the catalogue at Dabs for the right memory card I was so relieved to have finally made it through the confusion and uncertainty that I didn't notice they still had my old address on file and thanks to their incredibly efficient system it was dispatched within minutes of my pressing the big button. Unfortunately their incredibly efficient system is efficient because they don't have any communication with their customers at all and so can't cancel or alter an order, so it's going to Kingstanding. At least there's no confusion or uncertainty about that, just a big fat pain in the arse.

There was one point of victory in Halfords where I popped in to gaze at the bike stuff and find out what they charge for a safety check (£10.99) - I was approached by a young chap talking 10 to the dozen about saving me £50 on my next purchase. I tried to stop him but he kept going until I held up my arms and sternly announced that if he didn't shut up I would never buy anything from this shop ever again, at which point he did shut up and walk away. It's a real shame as most of the assistants in that branch are good helpful people.

Perhaps the worst example was the in-store radio at PC World pushing anti-virus software in a tone that seemed to imply we'd all die a horrible death without it, but that's not too surprising.

So creating confusion and uncertainty would appear to be standard procedure amongst companies these days. I can't see that Google has done anything particularly unusual in that regard, especially as they appear to have done so unintentionally unlike most retail outlets.

Please stop asking for free sunflower seeds. The offer was over six months ago and was for my regular readers in the UK.

Excuse the rant but I need to get this off my chest.

Google maps is pissing me off. Not for the mapping, which is good (though some more details other than roads would be nice), nor for the interface, which is superb and the main reason I use it above all others. No, the thing that is bugging me is, ironically enough, the search system.

I'm trying to locate a church in Birmingham which I understand is very overgrown and in a state of disrepair, which is a shame for the church but intriguing for photos. It's called St Saviours and it's in Saltley. Putting that information in the search produces this result - two places that are nowhere near Saltley. But I managed to get what I think is the full address and tried that. Loads of results all over the show and none of them specific to the church.

This happens a lot because the Google maps search is geared around Yellow Pages listings. If you're looking for some kind of shop or service then it's no doubt super but if you're looking for a location and you don't know the postcode then you're stuffed. And when you do find the place, usually by scrolling around and cross referencing with an A-Z, and want to send someone a link to it, can you specify where the marker goes? Can you fuck.

It's a bloody disgrace, I tell you. If Streetmap.co.uk and Multimap weren't so fecking ugly I'd leave in a minute. Sort it out.

(I believe the church is here, but not where the marker is - the other end of the road.)

I've noticed that when I'm in a state of semi-sleep I'm able to make up stories. This isn't like lucid dreaming - it's more a hypnagogic state, or something. Hell, I dunno. What I find is that I start telling a story in my head and it's always fucking great, the best thing ever written. I don't so much see the action as see the words emerge. The trick seems to be to just let it happen, gently guiding but never trying to control it too much.

Of course when I wake up I forget the whole thing, which is an utter downer as they're really good stories that I'm sure you'd all enjoy, but last night there was a phrase that was struck me as genius. It hung around, basking in its glory and impressing me so much that I forced myself to stop telling the story and wake up to write it down. Here it is:

"Simple presentation of what Anglicized countries mean."

Y'see? Utter genius!

When my mum came to visit a while back and we went to Selfridges for a laugh we did actually buy something. I was drawn to the island of American foodstuffs, particularly the absurdly overpriced jars of peanut butter, when something odd caught my eye. A white jar with a red lid labled "Marshmallow Fluff". Picking it up I discovered it had no weight. It was essentially a jar of very sweet air and it had to be purchased.

You may wish to play this while reading on:

With mother safely deposited on a train I went home to reveal this marvel to the flatmates. We gingerly dipped fingers in and pronounced it the sweetest thing ever. Later that night as I lay in bed I found myself craving more. Truly this is the crack cocaine of spreadable foodstuffs!

This evening I finally tried it on toast.

It's actually less hardcore when mixed with bread and marg but still has that sugary kick. I fear I may be hooked.

Of course there's the obligatory website but it's actually pretty neat. Turns out Marshmallow Fluff has been around for 75 years in the US...

"Marshmallow Fluff is still produced by the same batch process developed over 75 years ago - it's the only marshmallow creme made in this manner. It's what makes Durkee-Mower's product so fluffy, white, and smooth; it's what makes the difference. Because Marshmallow Fluff is made only with the finest ingredients under the most demanding sanitary conditions, it requires no artificial preservatives."

Here's the official history of Fluff along with an mp3 of the 1930s Fluff jingle by the Flufferettes.

Next I'll be trying the Fluffernutter combining as it does my long time fave spread peanut butter with the mighty Fluff.

(I realise this is like some American saying "gee, over in England they drink tea with milk - how weird is that!" and I apologise, but how the hell did you guys keep this secret for 75 years?)

The threatened fuel protests and subsequent panic buying of petrol has come somewhat out of left field for me, not being a driver, and it all seems somewhat bizarre. I am reminded though of when this happened last time so if it all does go stupid remember what my mate Tom said back in September 2000.

"I nip down to Sainsbury's to stock up on my bread and milk. There was no bread. There was no milk. Nothing but middle-class housewives in turmoil: "It's ridiculous... ridiculous... there's no milk, no bread..." I couldn't keep a straight face at the sheer Shatneresque melodrama of their cries.

"Needless to say, I kept a cool head and found my bread and found my milk. Ironically enough it was at the local Shell station. Nobody thought of looking there because they'd run out of petrol yesterday."

A review of the new "Berliner" sized Guardian newspaper as purchased from my local newsagent shop this morning for 60p:

• It's very small. In fact when folded and stacked it now has the smallest cover on the market.
• G2 used to feel like a magazine that was having a big stretch. Now it feels like a magazine.
• No Doonesbury? When did that happen?
• Handy throw-away sports section.
• Nice interview with Ooona King.
• Masthead didn't bother me at all. Seems more intrusive when viewed online. Looking at it again, it cleverly divides the area above the fold in two. Very neat.
• I'd forgotten how many wanky, glib opinion pieces the paper has - so easy to avoid them online (this is true of all papers though).
• So very small...

One thing I was really hoping they'd do was make some serious attempt to link the print version to the website. There were hints of this in the hype but nothing decent seems to be there. How hard would it be to have a short, TinyURL style address at the foot of every article? Something like guardian.co.uk/050912/34, say, which would redirect to the normal crufty address. Obviously this would be useful for bloggers but surely ordinary people too?

When you frequently slip out of the commonly accepted norm for sleeping patterns you become acutely aware of exactly when a day begins and ends. Say for example you've stayed up late on Monday night. When does Monday stop and Tuesday begin? The brute logical answer is at midnight but this just doesn't play. A better answer would be the day ends when you go to sleep and starts when you get up, but this is too subjective. Dawn is probably the best indicator, though it is subject to seasonal variations.

Of course since most people are asleep between midnight and six it doesn't really matter. Those who are awake and alone make their own time and those who are with others will usually be on their own structured time frame, such as a factory shift. All that really matters is that by seven or so the day has started no matter how long you've been awake for.

However it matters to me in one small area. Blog date stamps. I mentioned this a few years back and it still hasn't been resolved. If I post something at 1am it's labled as being posted on Tuesday, but psychologically I'm posting on Monday.

However, if I could somehow tweak the system so Tuesday started at 6am this would lead to confusion as everyone else would assume that when my blog says Monday at 4am it means a time 24 hours previous to the actuality. Maybe we need a more granular system of week division, a day/night division that's not based on am and pm. I never liked pm anyway since it can mean anything from early afternoon to late night.

Here then is my solution:

Monday: 6:00h - 20:00h
Monigh: 20:00h - 6:00h
Tuesday: 6:00h - 20:00h
Tuesnigh: 20:00h - 6:00h
Wednesday: 6:00h - 20:00h
Wednesnigh: 20:00h - 6:00h
Thursday: 6:00h - 20:00h
Thursnigh: 20:00h - 6:00h

and so on.

A date stamp for Wednesday 6th July at 3am would now read "Tuesnigh 5th July 03:00".

I think it makes sense. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Things you might have thought were crap but actually aren't part one: Bruce Springsteen

• Born in the USA is actually an anti-war song. See if you can track down the acoustic version with all the Regan-era bombasticism taken out.
• Billy Bragg really rates him.
• Represents the working-class American man.
• C'mon, you've got to admit Thunder Road kicks ass.

My first Freecycle acquisition is a 1980s Amstrad home studio thingy. I've been wanting to learn about hard-core audio stuff for ages but never found an entry point. This could be it. Or at least by the time I figure out how to record from this into my Mac I'll be an expert. So many buttons and nobs! And no manual!

The story behind this is kinda neat. I've been following the Birmingham Freecycle mailing list for a few weeks and wrote about it here. When this came up I was very interested so I went to email the chap offering it, only to discover it was my chum Gareth who I'd turned onto Freecycle. Not only that, but the studio had been in my flat for five years - he'd just got it back in November. And now it's back again. Some kind of destiny...

The post title is a line from the Mountain Goats song Letter From Belgium. We seem to be acquiring a fair amount of kit right now so it's rather apt. We don't need any stage makeup though.

I knew the Daily Express was getting worse but this is beyond parody.

via Jonathan, originally on the BBC news site.

When cycling home from the cinema after watching Kung Fu Hustle keep in mind the following facts:

1) You cannot fly

2) You are not attached to wires

3) You are not invulnerable

and you'll be fine.

Perhaps the greatest source of irrelevant intolerance (as opposed to intolerance that makes people want to kill other people) is, as far as I can tell, food and the way it is eaten. While I am, on the whole, an "eat anything as long as it's edible" kind of guy there are certain lines which cannot be crossed. Skimmed milk is one. It's not milk - it's white water that smells mildly of milk. Sugar in tea has recently become another. It's very odd, since quitting in March I've become something of an anti-sugar fanatic. Occasionally I make a cup for someone with a couple of spoonfuls and it just seems wrong. It's all I can do to stop preaching at them on the error of their ways. And butter is stupid and the world should wake up to the fact that margarine is far superior because it spreads without fucking up the bread.

There's a pattern developing here - these are all things connected with breakfast which even for a culinary retard like myself is a constant and important part of the day. It's a ritual and rituals are very important. I've been thinking about rituals quite a lot recently. It sprang from a pub conversation about why drugs are consumed in very specific and orderly ways, from the heroin tea-spoon to passing the joint to the right (or is it the left, I forget...) through to drinking beer out of pint glasses. But what really interests me are the little rituals that seem inconsequential but which are utterly sacred, such as how tea is made or the order in which one gets dressed.

For example, one thing that really brings out the irrational idiot in me is washing up. I have an utterly anal method involving washing, rinsing and stacking which cannot be changed. When I see someone not rinsing a plate or stacking the dishes and pans in an inefficient manner I feel a small but significant tenseness in my shoulders. This might spring from washing up being one of my regular chores as a child, especially as for a few years my sister was too young to reach so it was my domain, but that's no excuse. It's petty and stupid of me and it's not like I even like washing up, as many ex-housemates will attest. It's just one of those things.

So, the question is, what are your idiotic rituals that you dare not speak about? Things that bug you even though you know you're just being a twat?

Was woken up on Thursday morning by a text message from a London based friend: "Just in case you were worried, we're all fine" which was a little odd as I wasn't worried. Made some breakfast, checked emails, clicked over to a news site... Ah.

Watched the news for a while, leaving it on in the background as I painted and, since I have nothing really to add at this moment about things that actually matter, that's what I'm going to write about. Journalists and the orgainsations they work for really are a form of evil.

As serious events are unfolding all they can do is report and, truth be told, they do a good job of that. At least the BBC do - I didn't bother with any other TV news stations. The information was unfiltered, police briefings given in full, speeches unedited for sound-bites. It was all very raw and allowed those who knew what was going on to communicate what facts they had and distinguish them from speculation and rumour.

At this stage I was thinking how calm and rational everything was, given the circumstances. It struck me that if the best response to a terrorist attack is downright refusal not to be terrorised, to pick up the pieces and get on with your live as best you can, then London appeared to be doing just that. Indeed, the one of the main messages being given out were how people should deal with getting home with the somewhat incredible news that the tube would be running pretty normally by the next morning. They can bomb us as much as they like but we'll not be swayed from continuing our normal lives.

Of course this madness could not be allowed to continue. The facts had to be turned into a story. Any rumour that could be construed to be really scary was massaged into a qualified fact, language was tweaked from straight reportage to mild hysteria. You could feel the sigh of "finally" as Jack Straw said the bombings bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack, neglecting to mention that they also bore all the hallmarks of any number of terrorist bombings. Yes, it probably was perpetrated by people related to or inspired by al-Qaeda, but nothing is conclusive. And so on and so on.

By the end of the day the TV news was on hysteria overload. With no additional news to broadcast they resorted to filtering it into a nightmare story with shock-horror headlines and a paranoid tone. In other words, they did their level best to terrorise people. Nice one, guys and gals.

If I was still living in London, I like to think I'd be using public transport and existing in London exactly as I always did. Not only are the odds of getting caught up in something like this astronomically large but I refuse to be terrorised by (what appears to be) religious nutters. Fuck you all.

In my little world, while as far as I can tell everyone I know is fine, I was affected by the bombings. I haven't been able to send a text message since Thursday lunchtime. And if that's the sum of my troubles then I'm endlessly grateful. [Later: turns out I'd just run out of credit and my phone doesn't have the UI to inform me of this - goes to show you shouldn't jump to conclusions in events like these...]

Got an email from an old friend I hadn't heard from in over two years. Seems this blog had been cropping up in his Google searches rather a lot and he decided to get in touch. So thank you, Google.

Right - back off to Kingstanding for a few more days of intensive house-painting...

If you are used to using your socks as a reminder as to when to do your laundry, you may find, during the summer, that you run out of pants because you haven't been wearing quite so many socks in the hot weather.

My chum Kath was needs a banner. One of those large PVC things with holes in the corners that you can stretch across a wall advertising something. Only she needs it on the cheap.

I mentioned that I'd stumbled across a company that does them on some weblog I was reading the other day. They were apparently quick, cheap and recommended. They also were kinda ethical, doing banners for Greenpeace and other orgs.

Of course not being in the market for a banner myself I didn't make a note and I can't for the life of me remember which blog it was now. So I'm posting this here.

When posting paranoid rants to mailing lists and message boards, please observe the following tips.

Paragraphs are your friend. No more than two or three sentences per paragraph please. Speaking of which...

Sentences are not paragraphs. They tend to be shorter. They also have these things called commas which divide them up.

Sumarise your actual point, assuming there is just the one, so I have a vague idea of what it is you're rambling about.

Capitalisation is not an either/or option. Upper and Lower case characters can co-exist peacefully in the same sentence when employed correctly.

Actually, carry on as usual.

Too hot to work today so I decamped to the sofa to sarcastically watch Tim Henman play really badly for a bit and then play slightly better and win getting everyone all impressed as they temporarily forget that it's a first-round match that against some unknown kid that he should have walked, but even though there's probably a better match on BBC2, possibly even one with ladies grunting attractively, you still have to watch it for some perverse, masochistic reason. Dr Zoop joined me and we were sniggering away at the somewhat surreal commentary when the commentator, I know not his name, uttered this gem:

He rushed off like a robber's dog

And we laughed and laughed like drains. The rest of the match was half spent trying to figure out exactly what the origins of that phrase was (do robbers generally have dogs when in the act of robbing? And if they are required to rush, where to exactly?) and half waiting for him to top that, but nothing was forthcoming.

This isn't strictly a Colemanball since they on the whole make some kind of sense. This is just random bonkers, and all the better for it.

If the heat continues I will be watching out for more of these. If you spot any, feel free to comment.

Also, is it me or are the camera men getting more obsessed with sour-faced pretty blonde posh birds in low-cut tops? Nothing new, I know, but combined with the slo-mo closeups of Henman's undulating thighs it all felt a little porn-y for a Tuesday afternoon.

I can moan for a very long time about Virgin trains, specifically the trains Virgin use for their "replacement Inter-City" service rather than the company in itself. The chairs are too rigid, the arm-rest by the window doesn't raise so you can't curl up and sleep, and those massive toilets with the disconcerting electronic lock that somehow make the entire carriage stink of disinfectant.

But they have got one thing right - the Quiet Zone carriage. Oh, how I love the Quiet Zone. Such a remarkably good idea - a place where the misanthropic can escape the endless turmoil of society's seeming obsession with talking loudly about nothing. Until recently the Quiet Zone would occasionally be invaded by an illiterate moron who cannot comprehend the existence of an area where phonage is not permitted, but my journey down from Birmingham to Winchester on Monday was 100% quiet. Either I got very lucky or a sea change has happened. The Quiet Zone is now respected by society at large.

Now, you might be thinking that the Quiet Zone is relatively new creation brought about by the irritation of the mobile phone, but it's not. It actually has a historical precedent in railway transportation. Younger readers may not believe this, but at one stage you could smoke on trains. There was a whole carriage dedicated to smoking. The seats were usually dirty, the air stagnant and the general ambiance rather off-putting, but beyond the advertised bonus of being able to smoke while trapped in a metal tube for hours there was a distinct advantage.

Ordinary people stayed the hell away.

From the platform they'd spy the empty seats on an otherwise crowded train and think their luck was in, but on entering the acrid smoke would hit them and they'd back off, taking their self-obsessed self-interested selfishness with them. Parents were the best - they'd drag their brood along the length of the train looking for that elusive four-seats-free booth and on entering our nirvana would loudly declaim it to their children as if we were lepers, before moving on only to discover all that lay ahead was first class so they had to struggle back though our midst with their tired brats and large arses. And we sat there with our expanse of empty seats smugly smiling to ourselves, safe in the knowledge that, for the period of this journey, we were free from such nonsense. Of course such wonders could never last and with the excuse of cleaning bills (like we cared!) the smoking carriage was banished, never to return.

Smokers have been demonised by right-thinking society as anti-social idiots passively spreading cancer with their filthy habit and, unlike the obese, having the audacity to look cool in the process, all of which is fairly justified, but belies the fact that other than the actual smoking thing, smokers are generally nice people to be with. Why this is, I'm not really sure, though I have some ideas which maybe I'll try to articulate in a future post, but the fact remains that, ratio-wise, where smokers are gathered you'll find more nice, easygoing people than elsewhere.

Now, the folk in the Quiet Zone of the train weren't overtly friendly. Given the nature of the thing they're pretty quiet and kept themselves to themselves, but it still felt like a home I hadn't visited for a long time. Quiet Zone people - you are the new smokers. And that's a huge compliment.

I'm off to my mum's for a week or so to do some DIY-type stuff and try to fix her computer. Given that my PC-guru uncle failed to get anywhere with it I'll put an emphasis on the try, meaning I may well be without net access for a little bit. So if I don't reply to your emails that's why.

(But Pete, you never answer your emails promptly anyway. How will we tell?)

[Update: Typically it's all fixed - she took it to a shop and they sorted it for a small fee - so I'm online. On dial-up though so major link-farmage will have to wait...]

My bike has a click. It seems to be triggered by pedaling, but only when a reasonable amount of force is placed on the pedal while in motion, because it cannot be replicated by pushing the pedal by hand. It's not a critical click, just a present one, and because it only occurs when I'm moving along at some speed there's no way I can get down and figure out exactly what it is that is doing the clicking. A solution would be to have someone traveling alongside me at exactly the same speed with their head about a foot off the ground, but since the click isn't terminal I'm not going to bother sorting that out.

My website currently has a click, or at least my installation of Movable Type does, but they're pretty much one and same as far as you're concerned. Every so often this evening I've been getting the dreaded "Internal Server Error" informing me that the server "was unable to complete your request" which usually happens after installing some new widget and forgetting to configure it properly, only I haven't installed anything. And the server is completing the request. Everything is rebuilding as required. So it's a click. Mildly annoying but not apparently critical.

I have set up a new template for the Google Sitemap but that's just producing an (admittedly quite large) page of pretty ordinary text so shouldn't be causing any problems. Stopping it rebuilding does stop the click, but I'm at a loss as to why it's clicking in the first place. The ever useful error logs tells me that there was a "premature end of script headers" in my mt.cgi program which is like saying something metal is rubbing against something else metal and making a clicking noise. I guess what I need is for someone who knows about such things to watch it going through the motions and gently prize those click causing routines apart. Or I could just rebuild the Sitemap manually every week or so.

Why did I start writing this again? Oh yeah - neat analogy. I'm a sucker for those...

BBC News: Prescott backing hooded tops ban

I wonder how the Bluewater branch of JJB Sports feels about this ban since it's probably going to hit their profit margins quite hard.

While I have no desire to set foot in the Bluewater shopping centre, I do habitually wear a hoodie, sometimes raised over my head in cold weather, and due to sunglasses not fitting over my normal glasses, do tend to wear a baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes. I find myself wondering if, in the government's desire to stamp out all forms to anti-social behaviour, I'm going to be trailed around town centres by plain clothes community support officers from now on.

I discovered the joy of the zip-up hooded top years ago and have been sold ever since. Truly it is the perfect garment in so many ways - practical yet always mildly stylish and there nothing like a hoodie to make a cute girl cuter.

Perhaps the hoodie and baseball hat combination needs to be reclaimed in the same manner that the English flag needs to be reclaimed from the BNP. Actually, we could probably kill two birds with one stone here.

As technology and science march ever merrily on, commerce looks at the advances and ponders whether to take them on. When taking them on there is, I assume, a balance to be struck between how much time/money said innovation will save the company that adopts it and how much time/money the customer will save. If the increase in saving is reasonably proportional, or at least an actual increase for both parties, then said advance is a good one and will be adopted across the board. For example, when the debit card replaced the cheque book for transactions in shops the shops and banks saved time and money in processing payments while the customer saved time and hassle in paying for things. Win-win.

I've noticed, however, that the are a few innovations that are being encouraged onto the market where the win-win is not so clear. Using your PIN number for card transactions is one I'm not so keen on. Not only is it more hassle for the customer who is used to just passing their card to the assistant and letting them deal with it, but it puts the burden of proof on them. With the current system, if you dispute a charge on your statement the shop has to go through their paper records (which they have to hold for five years) and present physical evidence that you signed for it. If they can't then they absorb the loss. The new PIN system has no paper trail. If someone uses your card with your PIN it's assumed that you didn't keep your number secret and the shop washes their hands. Given this rather dramatic shift it seems a little unrealistic that the customer should be expected to adopt the new system.

Another area I've noticed this is in the realm of paper records. I'm being encouraged to stop receiving my pay slips and bank statements through the post and just get them online or in emails, and I can see no reason why I should. Certainly, I don't use my paper statements in the way I used to - by the time I get them they're already a week out of date and should I need to check anything I do it online - but it's nice to know they're sitting there in a pile as a nice, perfectly formatted record of my finances. Similarly for pay slips - once a year I need to go through them all and send them off to the tax office and student loans company. If I have to print them out from emails, which I might have lost if my computer dies or whatnot, or specifically request paper copies, then a burden has been placed on me. But not sending out sheets of paper every week/month saves the bank and my employer significant sums of cash, so they're in favour of it.

Like most things, this isn't really a big deal, and I'm probably making more of it than is necessary, but it seems to me that the constant shaving of costs to increase profit margins by large-ish companies is moving from being subtle and hidden to being quite blatant, often dressed up in some rubbish about how it'll benefit customers and users when it really pushed a small but significant amount of effort and responsibility onto them, things that you would assume were part of the service. I wonder how far it'll go?

Many many years ago, in the dim and distant days before weblogs, back when having an email address was kinda cool except you only knew a couple of other people with email addresses and they were your mates who you met in the pub anyway, I did a zine. Actually, I did many zines, but one of them was a review zine called Strands. After the first issue, which contained reviews of small press comics by a number of different people, I announced that the next one would just be by me and would review all sorts of things. As an example I said I would review cigarette papers, which at least one person took as a cue to take the piss. In the end I didn't review cigarette papers in the second issue but I did write an article for the University paper comparing all the different brands of Rizla available, the premise being that by the time the smoking student reched the third year they could no longer afford the Marlboro Lights of their fresher days and might need some guidance as to their next step. It was never printed and a few years later, by chance and out of context, I met one of the editors who told me they thought it was a joke that they hadn't printed due to sensitivity over drug issues. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't about drugs. I was being serious.

Generally I prefer the Rizla Blue, a "fine weight" paper that has enough support but doesn't give the harsh burning flavour of a Red or Green. However, while stocking up with baccy at the Co-op I noticed a box of Silvers, previously only available in jumbo not-really-for-joints-honest size but here in perfectly legitimate rollups format. Since the Co-op has consistently refused to sell regular Blues, forcing me to brave the teenage chavs outside the off-license, I asked for a bundle.

A few years back Rizla experimented with Whites. These were an interesting variety having the same weight as a Red but with teeny tiny perforations which made for a smoother smoke. I liked them a lot as while they retained the rollups advantage of not burning away in the ashtray like a normal fag they didn't tend to go out as much as your standard paper. Also, the perforations made gripping the paper during rolling easier, a plus point for the novice. Unfortunately Rizla never rolled them out (as it were) to newsagents so you could only buy them at not-really-for-joints-honest establishments and eventually they vanished (though they're still featured on the website, which is intriguing). Whether the same will happen with the Silvers remains to be seen.

My verdict then. They're a lovely paper, very translucent but still quite firm. In fact more resistant to tearing than the blues, which is a little odd for something so thin. The texture is closer to tracing paper than the average paper which makes for a curious cigarette, especially once lit when any moisture in the tobacco evaporates and sinuous tobacco is made highly visible. This dampness isn't as pronounced as it could be, but it does encourage the bitter taste to travel past any roach or filter you may have included moreso than the blues. This is a major negative point as it leaves something of a bitter aftertaste on the lips. As for the burning any difference is hard to detect, possibly because any reduction in burning paper taste was negated by the bitterness flow. It's also interesting to note that the Silver has pronounced ridges running along its length, similar to other 'speciality' papers Rizla has experimented with in the past, which might explain the slightly faster burning rate I'm noticing. I think these lines are to ensure an even burn, which they do well, but the speed issue needs to be examined in more depth. Actual rolling is a breeze. While I haven't experimented in damp conditions, the tracing paper consistency does seem quite resistant to fingertip sweat (in a strange contradiction to the moisture absorption during burning - perhaps they're actually watertight and the moisture is rushing up towards the mouth rather than escaping through the paper?) and a nice tight roll around the roach / filter is achieved with ease. This may also be to do with those ridges. Also of note is how the paper comes out of the packet flat and doesn't do that annoying curling-over-itself thing that Reds and Blues tend to, although these packets are fresh and after a few days in the field they may start to exhibit this symptom. Again, further testing is required.

[Update: A non-critical but rather annoying design flaw has become apparent. After removing a paper from the packet it is customary to hold it in the light to ensure the gummed strip is showing, thus preventing the unfortunate mistake of rolling the cigarette backwards. The Silvers have a watermark with the Rizla logo embedded in them, but when the gum is facing the users the logo is reversed, thus creating a slight cognitive dissonance. Sloppy.]

In conclusion, a good effort and aesthetically a lovely paper, but I think I'll be sticking with Blues on the basis of the bitterness. For those who don't roach or filter, and who therefore do not mind or even enjoy the bitter taste of tobacco on their lips, these would definitely be a go-er.

I just saw this over on Jez's blog where he's quoted someone. They start off with "Thank G-d I'm not dependent..." and it got me thinking about people who self censor. Usually it's religious stuff or swearing, and I always find it odd. If you object to swearing that's fine, but J*s*s, if you're going to f***ing swear, then do it properly, you c**t. That's what I say. But then people are odd and that's the point of them really.

I have a nice long post planned for the weekend. Some wacky stuff happened at work this week and it's a good one, but it needs to digest a bit first and Friday should put it all into context.

One of the mailing lists I'm on got trolled this week, which was interesting as it rarely happens to places I hang out on. I was surprised that I was one of the first to cry "troll" while other were still giving the benefit of the doubt, not because the others were naive or stupid or anything - for a while I thought I might have been mistaken - but because despite having never been in a flame war or whatnot I was able to spot it for what it was. I guess my net-fu is stronger than I thought.

During a long oops-I-forgot-mothers-day-oh-you-weren't-in-anyway phone call with my mum I realised I'd forgotten how old I was. Turns out I'm 32, not 33.

Thanks to the MyBlogLog service which records how many times links on the main page of my site are actually clicked on (kind of a reverse stats thing), I've actually discovered some accurate information about my users. Of those who have broadband and download 50mb files of music, exactly half use the web site while the others use the RSS feed or LiveJournal. Which was nice to know.

Doctor Who is really good. I know it's a bad thing to download it before it's even been shown on telly, but I was never going to watch it that way anyway and will be torrenting the rest, so my conscience is clear.

UK people who, like me, have teeny tiny issues with spelling tend to rely on spell checkers just a bit. If, like me, they tend to use any old random text editor rather than some overblown monstrosity like Word, they have to go through a dance with each one, adding in words that Americans can't spell properly. It's most annoying, like training puppy after puppy.

I want a text file, nothing more, that contains all these words with their z's replaced with s's and their u's added after the o's and before the r's. Then I can go through it and add each and every one of them to the dictionary. Anyone seen one?

Following on from this...

Marv asked: "When you get out of the shower, which part of your body do you dry first?"

When I was a kid someone, I think my grandma, told me I should dry from the top down, because if you work from the bottom up your wet top will drip onto your dry bottom (as it were) meaning you have to start over again. So I start with my head, move down my arms, then torso, then groin area and finally legs and feet. This is not some obsessive thing, just a habit built up over 25 or so years. On a tangent, it puzzled me for years why my towel ended up soaking wet and needing a good radiator or ventilated space to dry out while the towels of the various females I've shared an abode with just end up mildly damp and can be hung anywhere, and since I haven't shared towel drying space with a bloke for ages I could never be sure if it was a gender difference or something I was doing wrong. I tried drip-dying for a minute or so before engaging the towel but that made no difference. Then it suddenly flashed into my mind that, as a bloke, I'm kinda hairy while women, on the whole, aren't. Bingo.

Jez asked: "When did (or will) you consider yourself to be a "grown-up"?"

There are probably loads of times when I've come to a realisation that I'm "grown up". A recent one was last year when I was walking down to the local shops and had to pass through the gang of Chavs that hang out at the Circle. (And yes, I know Chav is a class-based derogatory term but in this case it's 100% accurate, trust me on this.) At first I was nervous, flashing back to when I was a teenager and would have been threatened by such youths, but then it occurred to me that, at 33, I was old enough to be their dad, which explained why they were ignoring me. I was a grown up and therefore beneath their notice.

That said, I don't identify at all with my peers who have proper careers, families and the like. (Yourself excepted for some reason, Jez) and often feel like I'm living a different life to most 30-somethings. Sometimes this feels like a legitimate alternative existence but sometimes I do feel somewhat immature. Usually the former, I'm glad to say. When I get around to Brendadada's question about being an Uncle I'll expand on this. On the whole, though, the fact that I often realise I'm a grown up probably says a fair bit abut whether I really am or not.

Brendadada asked: "Sameyness in shops, they way people dress, the cityscape, anything samey. Hmm?"

On the whole a bad thing, but you've got to be careful. Remember the village theory. As human beings we evolved in small communities but in the last few hundred years we've started living in massive ones. The way we cope with this is by stereotyping and categorising things until they become familiar. So to jump back a couple of paragraphs, when I see the youths at the Circle I lump them all into the "Chav" category and think no more about them. Actually, this happened last week. When I went to the tedious not-transistor checking job I recognised one of the temps from somewhere but couldn't figure it out. He definitely recognised me though and it turned out we were working at that Tyre factory I moaned about and that he was one of the principle baboons that were pissing me off so much. But here he was on his own, chav-wise, just me, three African guys and the supervisor. Now, he's still an idiot but we've been talking during breaks and he taught me some card games and stuff. He's now an individual human being in my view rather than a stereotype. And I don't think I was wrong to judge him in that way back then. I just don't have the capacity to treat every person as an individual and there has to be a cut off point.

You can take this theory to pretty much anything you experience in life. Shopping centres, for example. I hate shopping centres. They all have the same shops none of which have anything of interest to me and the layouts and ambiance I find oppressive. But there are people for whom these environments are very attractive and they can spot the nuances and differences between the shops. Okay, I'm stretching this one a bit. Howabout comics? I know my comics really well and can judge the relative merits of comic art on many many levels, but most people will judge it on really basic criteria such as "readable", "nice" and "pretty" with the general conclusion that it's all a bit samey because they're just not used to looking at it in a critical, deep way. And that's fine. A little frustrating, but fine. I'm the same with clothes. Or potatoes. A potato is a potato in my book, but an expert in spuds would be horrified at my ignorance.

On the whole, then, when it comes to groups of people I'm very cautious about saying they're all the same. There are similarities but even with a room full of goths each one will be an individual. Of course, when it comes to the commercial realm it can be a problem. Take, for example, Waterstone's who I worked for for years. For years bookselling in this country was the antithesis of samey but as Waterstone's became a massive corporate presence they started consolidating their business bringing in elements of sameyness. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but they continued to put over this image that they had massive range and were not all samey. Which was a lie. But to the average punter the range still seemed impressively large, which is understandable. A drop from 10,000 titles to 5,000 might be obvious to a seasoned bookseller but to someone who reads a book a month it's not noticeable.

Anyway, not as clear cut as you might think this one...

More questions please!

Due to my sister's prodigious breeding abilities my first nephew is due to pop into the would this Christmas to join my first niece. However, sister and bro-in-law are having trouble naming the unborn and have asked for help. I have no fecking clue at all so I gave the following advice:

Musically, the name in is 6/8 with Chilberto coming in on the third beat and a silence on the 6th, emphasis on the "ber", so any name has to fit in those first two beats. A one sylable name that flows over to the second beat works (like Jeff, but not Nick), a two sylable name, with an empahsis on the first beat works (like Jeff-rey) and a three or more sylable name can work but only if it can be speeded up. Nathaniel can just be done but it's kinda clumsy as it wants to start before the first beat (which actually hits on "than") with the second beat coming in on "el". Montague actually works, which is unfortunate (Monta-gue-Chil-ber-to-_).

I'm messing around with Instiki, a wiki program that was astoundingly easy to set up on the Mac and which might serve as a good scratch-pad for me to mess around with words-wise, and I noticed something the phrase Camel Case mentioned in the sidebar. After a while I realised what it meant - capitalised words squashed together to make new ones or, in the case of wikis, make links of them. So BugPowder, which is how I've always written it since coming up with the name circa 1996, is camel cased, in that it looks like a camel. And that really pleases me with big grins and everything.

GMail invites seem to have reached the tipping point in that everyone's offering them, or at least they've made it into my social circle at last. I have some. Let me know if you want in. I have had an idea (inspired by the conversation in this Slashdot post) of setting up a Gmail account, sending some mp3s to it, giving the login to selected friends and getting them to send mp3s to it as well. We can share music and comment on it (by replying to the emails with the mp3s attached) in total privacy with no legal implications. You may hear from me soon...

I'm again having a small case of writers block, the main issue being that I want to write about stuff in great detail but don't think I have the time to do so properly. Of course most of the things I want to write about probably only need a few paragraphs but my perception is that they need more and in the world of writer's block perception is everything. So to try and sort this out I'll just write the abstracts. I may well take these further one day:

LiveJournal wins: In which I, an avid non-user of LiveJournal, consider the options open to the modern blogger-to-be and come to the unlikely conclusion that LJ is the best of the bunch, which surprises me no end.

The end of temping?: In which I suggest the possibility that I may be about to stop working for the agency. I'm taking next week off and then staying at my mum's for a fortnight helping out with hallway redecoration. After than I'm seriously thinking about a retail Xmas in the book trade, if they'll take me. There are many reasons for this, the main one being I really really want to have an intelligent conversation with someone at work and I've found my social skill have become somewhat fucked over the last year. And the novelty wore off ages ago.

A visit to IKEA: in which I recount my adventures in bookcase buying at everyone's favourite household lifestyle warehouse with Sam's mum. Tales of mutual support and impulse-buying avoidance abound but the story is slightly ruined thanks to our good planning. Tuesday at 6pm is the best time to go as it's nice and empty. Instead I may recount the last time I went to IKEA on a bank holiday Monday.

Carnet De Voyage: In which I review Craig Thompson's new travel-comic which, while self-indulgent, over priced and utterly unsuitable for the general reader, I loved to pieces. Speculation follows about what this says about my tastes and whether such judgments about self-indulgence are valid criticism when joy is to gained by raw self-expression. Conclusion points people to his major work to date, Blankets, with a hearty recommendation despite Andy R's misgivings about its immaturity.

My failure in gardening: In which I recount my depression on discovering only one carrot came up and the slugs ate my courgettes. Resignation that I haven't got the interest or will to grow stuff and that I should just stick to killing things in the garden instead. Quite a short post this one.

The mystery of upload/download choking: In which I ask why, when I have 100kps capacity on my broadband connection, does the following happen: I'm uploading, via BitTorrent, at 20kps, the maximum permitted. While this is happening my downloads crawl at a pace that makes dial-up look fast, despite there being a good 80kps free. Restricting BitTorrent to a 5kps or so works but the question remains.

Alias and Angel: In which I admit to having watched all five seasons of Angel and the first two of Alias in the last couple of months. Witness my struggle as a ponder whether or not to talk about them on the blog in fear that I may turn into the kind of blogger I pity. What will the outcome be?

Flickr: In which I finally get off my arse and get a Flickr account, discover it's rather good actually and recommend it to you. I haven't actually done this yet so even the concept of this post is speculation, but I'm pretty sure this will be the result. Mention of how I was convinced that Flickr is a good idea based on discovering that Cal Henderson is on the team behind it as director of web development, explanation being that Cal was one of the prime movers in the early UK blogging scene coming up with aggregators, update lists and the like, and even was involved with B3ta at the beginning. I met him once and he seemed like a nice chap. Speculation about why this is important in deciding to go with a certain photo hosting service follows.

And that's just the posts I can remember wanting to write. Some of the above may be expanded upon in the future - feel free to vote for in the comments any that really intrigue you...

Overheard at work yesterday: "If things don't change they'll stay as they are", which made me smile. Reminded me of the Glenn Dakin (triffic cartoonist) saying "If you weren't here you were somewhere else."

Any other good ones in the comments please.

Tom's written a huge piece, What you should know before starting a doctorate, most of which is irrelevant as I'm not starting a doctorate, but the first chunk, about his dropping out of academia before completing, rang some bells. Specifically:

"Any statement I make about academia - or my experience of academia - that isn't entirely complimentary must necessarily be seen in the context of my own failure to complete the process. Because I'm not now Doctor Coates, any statement I make that puts any blame on anyone other than my own inadequacies can be dismissed as sour grapes or an inability to accept failure or inadequacy in one field or another."

In the last year I've been having more and more contact with my parents. Not that I hadn't had much contact with them before but due to various things (Dad gradually moving to the UK, neice Isobel being born, me being more transient) I seem to be seeing them more than I did. Which is cool, but due to step-parentage I'm finding there are too many syllables involved in the whole process. So from now on there's "the Maternals" and "the Paternals", as in "I'm visiting the Maternals this weekend". Then for Isobel there's the Maternal Maternals, the Maternal Paternals and the Paternal Grandparents (or maybe the Granmatmats, Granmatpats and Granpats). Trust me, if it's not simpler it can't make it more complicated.

This meme has been around a while but I think I have something to add:

Subject: emphysematous idyllic inducible maloney circumspect annals pectoralis sabina diet meat bias intricacy concept beget duplicable prerogative hesse infinitum mirfak apocryphal capetown inhalation recondite atheist counterclockwise melanesia clothesline

Body: Do you want bigger boobs ?

Well, after the five day marathon of employment I've had a good night's sleep, got up at 9.00am and feel fairly good. And I got my only Xmas card this morning, which is one more than I was expecting, but then none of my friends know where I live thanks to my transitory year and the joys of electronic communication. Plus I don't really go for this Xmas card malarkey.

I stopped giving cards sometime around, ooh, 1987 at school. I can't remember the exact reason but I remember thinking that whole routine of giving everybody in your year a card, regardless of whether you liked them or not, was kinda stupid and one year I just plain forgot to get around to doing it. Since then no-one has ever received a plain Xmas card from me. Oh, I might have sent the odd one to Grandma or in lieu of a present but none of this mass mailing guff. And guess what, I still have friends. Odd that.

The same goes for cards generally. Chalk it up to having worked in a card shop for a bit (and selling cards in the bookshops), seeing the stretching eternity of blandness that constitutes that industry. Fact is, they're all shit and I can't bring myself to give something shit to someone I like. I'll acknowledge that taken out of the context of the shop and marked with a personal message said card can take on a unique personality, but I've seen too much of the whole to take solace in the individual. And yes, there are nice cards out there, somewhere, but they're so bloody expensive.

When I was younger I used to make cards for people. That sentence sounds really sad but some of the best cards I've received have been hand made, mainly from cartoonists (who have that skill and often the sense of humour to go with it) but also from non-artist's like myself. Possibly the best card I ever got was a Valentines card from a girlfriend - a plain piece of red card folded over. Magic.

I don't have a problem with people giving me cards, though I never know quite what to do with them after the event. During my bin-man job I was emptying someone's recycling box and found a big wadge of birthday cards in there. There was about £30.00's worth in this one inch thick bundle, which seemed a bit of a waste, though at least it was being recycled.

This isn't something that really bugs me - it's just that having been outside the card-giving circuit for so long I find the whole thing slightly odd. £2.00 (more of less) for a piece of mass produced printed card with my name scrawled at the top and someone elses at the bottom. I'd rather have a pint and a chat.

Now it's off to try and fix the garden fence (which as mysteriously fallen down though I haven't noticed much wind of late) before wrapping Xmas pressies and heading off for five days of family Xmas joy.

Enjoy yours!

Overheard the midwife visiting this morning. Aparently there's a current trend for firemen to be new fathers because, according to her, of the strike last winter. So if the country wants to increase the birth rate, what with all these old people not dying and requiring pensions and stuff, all it has to do is reduce working hours.

Just popped out for a fag and saw an incredible but very small thing. The back garden here backs out onto a car park and is usually used as the main entrance to the house. As such there's one of those powerful halogen security lights that blasts down from the house through the plants and structures which in itself can be quite eerie. I'd gone for a little walk in the car park and was coming back when I saw a shimmering shape move across the roof of the shed. A spider was walking along the edge and the beam was magnifying it making it look huge. Unless it was huge. It only lasted a couple of seconds so I couldn't be sure. It seemed to glide along like a little alien craft.

A wonderful link from Metafilter takes us to International Standard Paper Sizes, a long, details and fascinating article explaining how the A3/A4/A5 system. Okay, fascinating if you've spent most of your life with photocopiers and zines but still worth a scan through.

Great MeFi discussion as well littered with good links and hardcore wryness.