So an inquiry into a jail at the time when one prisoner was killed by two others has concluded that the prison had “a criminal subculture“.
A criminal subculture. In prison. What a shocker.
Yesterday, following on from links by Tom and Laura, I entered into Waterstone’s “What’s Your Story?” competition.
The rules are simple – a story that’ll fit on a postcard, with a maximum of 600 characters. Due to the time-crunch in getting it done, (Yesterday was the last day for entries) I wrote the entire thing online, as I didn’t have time to print it, do it, scan it, send it, etc. However, that actually helped in a lot of ways, made it far easier to just get on with it.
When all’s said and done, 600 characters isn’t that much anyway. Although it’s an interesting (and, from the looks of it, popular) challenge to get an entire story into that number of characters.
I’ve no idea whether it’ll get any further, but for something approaching ten minute’s work, I’m not displeased with it at all.
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So yes, yesterday I downloaded and installed the new version of Firefox, Version 3. It’s being touted as the latest, greatest with supposedly some 5,000 improvements and fixes to it since v2.
And yes, it’s OK. At the moment it’s missing two of the add-on extensions that I swear by – Paste’n'Go (which allowed you to just paste a URL into the location bar, and immediately go to) and the Google Browser Sync extension (which allowed me to synchronise bookmarks etc. between my installs of Firefox on the laptop, home PC, and the PC at whatever workplace) – and it’s already been announced that Google won’t be doing the browser sync extension for v3, which is a massive pain. )Then again, it looks like Weave by Mozilla Labs may be an answer to that)
For the most part the changes between v2 and v3 aren’t all that visible. There’s some additions to the location bar which may or may not end up being irritating over time – I like having a location bar/history that just tells me the URLs I’ve typed in, not that does an automatic search of other urls I might be meaning instead. It may be that I get used to it, it may be that it irritates – if it’s the latter, I’ll find a way to kill it.
All told, it looks OK, and seems to be pretty usable. So far the only other significant annoyance is that it no longer highlights https secure connections by turning the entire location bar yellow. It does seem to change the favicon section to a padlock, but that’s simply not as immediately noticeable – and it’s a big change for people who’ve got used to seeing the location bar change colour to indicate a secure connection.
Still, it’s an advance, and we’ll just have to see how it goes. And there’s always Opera if I get annoyed by Firefox…
Quite why anyone would put Joan Rivers on a live show is beyond me, with her reputation for swearing and so on. But ITV’s “Loose Women” did so – not even a delay in which to put a bleep in – although Rivers thought there was a bleep system in place.
And Lo, she swears, and then gets her section cut short.
All told, though – very funny.
Is it better to be worried, or just depressed, when you get an email from an IT agency with the subject line…
Great Oppertunity!
Damn you, Tom, just as I was doing some work, you land me with a meme that’s actually quite cool…
“List seven songs you’re into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring.”
I’m neck-deep in other stuff at the moment, and wasn’t going to add links to them, but it turned out to be pretty easy to find stuff on so most likely won’t attach links to the songs/videos (unless I can find them easily) but here goes, in no particular order, seven songs currently infecting my head…
- Nick Cave’s “Song of Joy” from the “Murder Ballads” album. A long-time favourite, and now a small part of the inspiration for a short screenplay I’m writing when I get time/chance/opportunity
- Pendulum’s “Propane Nightmares” from “In Silico” (and the most recent single) – there’s just something unidentifiably fantastic about this for me, and I’m a definite fan of the video as well, creepy preacher and all.
- Nine Inch Nail’s “Something I Can Never Have“, a long-time favourite that still just plays into my head at various points.
- Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Jo” – I first heard this way back on a David Holmes Essential Mix for Radio One, and it’s always been a favourite. I downloaded a Bobbie Gentry album recently, and this was on it
- Dead Can Dance’s “Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove” – another favourite that is currently being part of the soundtrack for the short screenplay. It won’t be in the finished product, but it’s in my head now, so there we go.
- Duffy’s “Stepping Stone” – I like a lot of Duffy’s album, but for me this is the one that keeps coming back
and finally
- back to Nick Cave for “The Curse of Millhaven“, again from “Murder Ballads”. I’ve been revisiting this album recently, and the chorus (small as it is) is just too catchy by far. And the lyrics, well, they’re just genius.
Who will I tag with this pain-in-the-ass? Hmm, I think it’ll be
Last week, we entered into the annual quiz in one of the local villages, along with Herself’s mum and partner. (Now they’ve moved to the area, and in fact to the village in question)
It has to be said, we’re not bad on quizzes in general – we won the Spring one in our own village earlier this year, and came second in the Hallowe’en one last year, and won a couple of times at the pub quiz in Bracknell – so it’s something I don’t mind doing, and can be quite fun.
What we didn’t know until we got there last week though, was that the “prize” for winning this one was to do the questions for next year’s quiz. Now admittedly this could be quite fun, but at the same time well, we’ve got enough commitments at the moment anyway, and adding in the extra for doing about a hundred questions would perhaps be the straw that broke the back.
So all through the quiz, we were joking that we’d aim for not-quite winning. For the first half of the quiz, we were actually in the lead, which was a bit of a worry.
Still, by the end after a few mistakes of having two answers and opting for the wrong one, it turned out that we came…
Second
Not intentionally – if it hadn’t been for those mistakes we’d have won by about three points – but all the same, it was amusing to have ended up in exactly the position we’d been joking about throughout. Anyone listening in would’ve thought it was rigged…
