The return

Well, I’m back. *Raspberry noises* at Helen, for implying that I’d get withdrawal symptoms, and dial in from the mobile. (The fact that I was completely out of mobile coverage is utterly irrelevant – honest *Grin*) It was a fantastic time, loads of mountains and stuff, and there’ll be more pages about it when I get round to it. (Probably write more tonight after Turin Brakes)

Hiatus

Well, it’s now Saturday, and I’m off to the wilds of Scotland ’til next Friday. So there won’t be any updates – no internet, no mobile phones, no nothing. Just lochside, mountains, woods, hills, and bloody huge log fires.

Upon my return there’ll probably be some new stuff added in, as lappy will be going with me (spot the true IT addict) and knowing insomnia, I’ll have plenty of time to write. All the same, it’s a break, and a much needed one.

If you fancy it, have a ferret round the site – but otherwise, don’t expect any more updates ’til late on 28/02 when I come back. Oh, and then I’m out seeing Turin Brakes in concert anyway. Might be best to leave it ’til 1/03 then. *Grin*

Pop sensations

Having seen the way TaTu‘s single “all the things she said” is now the UK No 1 for the third consecutive week, it does make me wonder how many record producers and “Svengali” types are busy kicking themselves at not having thought of marketing the same type of girl group.

Will it mean a glut of pseudo-dyke duos in the next year? Will we see “PopDykes, the rivals”? Who knows – obviously TaTu have managed to be the front runners in this little marketing glitch – but I think it’ll be quite fun to watch the rest of the herd dashing to play catch up.

Hallucinations? Or just kids TV

I was trying to persuade myself this afternoon that I really hadn’t clicked on the TV and seen a purple and green badger. Having checked the programme’s website, I can honestly say that I wasn’t hallucinating.

All rumours about the drugs influence of people who write children’s TV are blatantly true. How can anyone doubt it now?

Exercises in Scale

Very silly, but quite clever too – a set of photos of parking spaces “filled” by toy cars. Pity about the hands etc holding the cars, but still fun.

Maybe it has potential to be like a Mirror Project 2.

The test of a true blogger

Over at Troubled Diva, Mike was answering some questions about “Are you a proper blogger?

These are my answers…

• You ditch the standard template you grabbed off the shelf when you first started blogging, in favour of a design of your own making. Guilty Well, not strictly true, as I never used the standard templates, and worked from the d4d “design” right from the start.
• You start caring about what happens in The Bloggies. Innocent Supposedly I should care – but I just can’t bring myself to do so.
• You get listed on Daypop or Blogdex. Innocent What’s even sadder is I didn’t even know of them.
• You discover that you’re in the Google Top Ten for something completely unlikely and unintended, which generates loads of hits. Guilty As I’ve commented on more times than enough.
• People start leaving you sneery, snarky, anonymous comments. Innocent Nothing yet. Mind you, I’d just delete them anyway, so what’s the point?
• You purchase your own domain name. Guilty Although in fairness it was before I even considered blogging. I came up with the name and liked it before I had any idea what would go on the site.
• You migrate from Blogger to Movable Type. Guilty well, semi-guilty – I’m considering it bigtime after the Haloscan farce.
• You start a “meme”. Innocent What’s one of them then?
• You stop participating in “memes” (ahem) and online personality quizzes (as well as re-posting chain e-mail “funnies”), because you’re above all that now. Innocent As this proves, I still do them if it’s a subject I find interesting/thought-provoking. But no, I’ve never been interested in doing every single one.
• You string loads of other weblog names together in the middle of a post, in one great long list of linky-love. Innocent Nope, not me. The biggest bunch of links is when I add people to the blogroll.
• You start dropping cute little in-jokes into the main body of your posts, which only a tiny handful of other webloggers will understand. Innocent Most of jokes are crap anyway, not worth the effort of being “in”.
• You attend a Blogmeet. Innocent – so far.
• You make a submission to the Mirror Project. Guilty
• You register your site with Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, Blogtree, Blogstreet, Blogwise, the Ageless Project, the Eatonweb Portal, GeoURL, Is My Blog Hot Or Not?, the UK Weblogs list…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Innocent As explained above, I’m obviosuly still new to all this, as I haven’t linked to any of those. Yet. *Grin*
• You set up an RSS feed. Innocent Maybe one day. Maybe not.
• You start saying things like: actually, I’ve started to find the whole terminology surrounding so-called “blogging” so limiting these days, because you know, I don’t really feel that I fit the definition of a “blogger” any more, and couldn’t we all start to move away from these wholly arbitrary restrictions, because I suppose that if anything, I would consider myself more of a “personal publisher”, but even then I feel that… Innocent Nope – not going to happen. I did write some stuff about this over here on Naked Blog but no, I don’t give a damn what this type of thing is referred to as.

So, guilty on five counts out of the fifteen or so. I’m pretty sure that makes me a completely improper blogger. Good, isn’t it?

Browser Wars

As regular readers of this site will know, I tend to avoid using Internet Explorer as much as humanly possible. Out of preference, I use either Opera or Mozilla for everything web-based. There’s a variety of reasons, but the main one is because IE is well known to be a major load of shite for security.

So why is it that companies like Royal Bank of Scotland and Britannia insist that people can only use their services through IE or old versions of Netscape?