Weekend

Well, I didn’t get to sleep overly much, even for a Bank Holiday. The parental visit has been OK, and fairly manic. I can’t deny it, no matter how bad it sounds, but having them here does stress me out. Ah well.

Saturday involved a trip to Imperial War Museum North, mainly for my dad to see the exhibition of Navy shipbuilders by Stanley Spencer. They were spectacular, and of an epic scale – but I found the rest of the IWM North’s displays to be really quite disappointing and not worth the time. However, the building is spectacular. Following the visit to IWM, we crossed the river to The Lowry Centre, and their exhibit of Lowry’s paintings and sketches. Personally, I think that the paintings are hugely over-rated, but the sketches that he did are quite wonderful, and in general don’t reflect the “matchstick men” style of the paintings.

Sunday we headed back into the city centre, as Manchester was holding some more of it’s Festival Europa events, with a Food and Drink event in Albert Square, and a Flower Market in St. Anne’s Square. Both were fun, the Food and Drink event also included a lot of local craftspeople, photographers, glass-artists and so on – which also meant I got to make some more contacts. Always a good sign.

Monday involved a visit to Manchester City Art Gallery, as they wanted to see Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, which is on tour currently.

All in all it’s been a fairly arty and creative weekend, and along the way I’ve also had a few ideas and thoughts about ideas for the future, which I’ll be working on over the next few months. Interesting stuff – and still fairly stressed dealing with the joys of parents. Ah well, it’ll be July before I have to see them again – living 200 miles away has it’s advantages.

Follow-Up

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Visitation Rites

I could really go off Bank Holidays. As well as everything else, I’ve got a visitation by the parents to deal with. All weekend – and with the addition of my brother on Saturday night.

So, don’t expect much in the way of content over the weekend. (I know, you don’t anyway) However, there may be a Scaryduck-esque primal scream at some point. Alternatively, Monday may just be a day of rants and venting. You have been warned.

Petty

Out of interest, is it just me who gets emails from self-important jumped up little twats? Because of the way it was sent (a title line of just “Most Urgent”, and fuck all in the body text, just a word .doc attachment) it fell into my “suspected spam” folder, which didn’t help. Also, despite it being “Most Urgent”, the dull little cock-knocker can’t even set the priority flag on it when sending.

Anyway, this document that was sent isn’t Urgent, let alone “Most Urgent” – it’s a load of guff, but it needs to go online today. Fair enough. However, if it’s that urgent, (and yes, it’s the same cock-knocker as before) then he should attach the document’s photo himself, rather than expecting my telepathic skills to be up to their normal stupendous levels of competence, and know (from the blank body text, remember) that the photo needs to be a) found and copied from another document, and b) attached into the Word doc, so that it can go online.

What I don’t need is for the cretinous budgiesucker to then call me up while I’m looking for the fucking photo and tell me (“Have you received my email?” – cunt can’t even figure out how to get a read receipt. Then again, it wouldn’t help him, as my PC is set to never send such a receipt. *Grin*) how amazingly important it is for the document to be online immediately. The response “Well I’ll put it up without a photo then, as it’s so urgent” doesn’t go down well – but fuck him, I’ve asked for it to be done repeatedly. “Oh no, no, it must have the chief exec’s photo on it” (bearing in mind that this guff is purely for the intranet, and not to be sent out into the real world at all) Fine, send me a copy of the photo, and it’ll be on now.

“Oh, well, I haven’t got a copy of it here. I’d have to get it ordered from Marketing, and I’m off at twelve”.

Ah, so that’s why it’s so urgent – because the pretentious little weasel wants to fuck off early.

“Management” *cough*

Ah, the joys of the workplace. Because it’s the start of a Bank Holiday weekend, a lot of people have taken the day off. Which is fair, except for a small problem that’s going to rear up and bite them on the arse on Tuesday.

Every single IT manager is off. There isn’t a manager in the department. (Mind you, this is almost certain to increase productivity, and lessen frustration) What they’ve forgotten is that there are now 10 or 12 contractors in the department. Who all* need to get their timesheets signed by – you guessed it – a manager in order to get paid next week. It’s not going to happen. So they won’t get their sheets signed ’til Tuesday, which means that they won’t be paid until a week on Monday, at the earliest.

File under : Brewery, Organise, Piss-up.

* = well, all except one, who thought this might be the case, and got his timesheet signed on the Wednesday before his manager stunk off on two days holiday. Can’t think who that might’ve been, can you?

Tossers

May’s a great month, if you travel using public transport. Two bank holidays means that Network Rail (Née Railtrack) have double the opportunities to fuck things up completely, and of course they take every chance they can get.

So yet again this coming bank holiday weekend is going to be a nightmare for a huge number of rail travellers. On the same weekend as the Motor Show in Birmingham, the train service between London and – you guessed it – Birmingham is out of action. This brings back yet more shades of last August, when they decided to take London-Reading out of action on the weekend of the Reading Festival. An utter fuck-up.

Of course, what the wankers will say is

“There are less people travelling on the trains during a Bank Holiday weekend than there are on a normal day”

but what they actually mean is

“Our season-ticket travellers (i.e. businessmen) won’t be travelling on this weekend, so we can fuck up the train system as much as we want, and not have to pay out compensation to the season ticket holders”

Not that I’m cynical or anything…

My Boss is a Twat

Stinky^® is away for the next two days, and has left me to fix some of the stuff on the site. Fair enough, at least it means I’m doing something.

But it also means that – yet again – I have to go through HTML and so on that’s completely bobbins. I swear the man doesn’t have a clue. All the styles that have been set up are faulty, and the pages are about 8 times larger than they need to be. I could cry – or beat the shite out of him when he returns…

Oh yeah, and (this will make more sense to techies) he’s also got formmail.pl being used without fixing the “to” address, so it’s open to abuse by spammers. This is the mark of a true IT fucknugget. Now – do I change it, or do I keep it as evidence of epic twadgedome?

System Lag

It’s already well known that I’m impressed in general with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. And fair enough, it’s still only on version 0.8, so it’s a known fact that it’ll have some issues.

But one that annoys me is that it appears to have a couple of huge memory holes – well, either that or it just hogs up the shite work PC I use. Does anyone else find that using Firefox for a while (i.e. two or three hours) ends up lagging the whole PC into a horrendous slug-esque pile of junk?

Just me then?

Hi8

Well, Peter of Naked Blog has gone off on hiatus/holiday for a while. All the best while you’re away, Peter.

Trailers – again

I’ve just seen the trailer for Harry Potter 3. Apparently it…

“Contains scary scenes and mild language”

Well fucking hell, that really makes me want to see it. Twadgeknackers.

Sorry, I should’ve said at the time that this was an additional post from the one yesterday about “The Day Before” – in which I’d wondered what Harry Potter 3’s “caution” line would be.

Burnin’ Down The House

Perhaps this is just me, but I can’t help disagreeing with the headline “Fire a disaster for Britart icons“. Tracey Emin’s “Tent” and “Hell” by Jake and Dinos Chapman – <sarcasm> They’ll be sorely missed in years to come</sarcasm>

If I were the police, and it turns out to be arson, my suspect list would probably contain people like Brian Sewell, and various people who have already professed to loathe Modern Art in the context of the Young British Artists and their ilk. And I must admit that in my view if it was arson then the arsonist should be given an award for services to art.

In the meantime, I really wouldn’t fancy being Charles Saatchi‘s insurers – that’s going to be one chuff of a payout.

Irritations 2

For my sins, I was watching BBC’s Cutting It last night, whichg was filmed in Manchester. The problem with this is that I know a good 90% of the locations used during filming, and can identify them fairly easily. In fact, the only parts I’m occasionally not sure on are the bars – but they’re normally easy to do as a set, rather than using a location, so that’s perhaps understandable.

However, I find I get consistently irritated by the way locations move, and are “linked”. Last night, for instance, two characters walked round the corner from Urbis museum, and found themselves on a walkway by – um – the Bridgewater Hall. That’s quite impressive – as the map below shows…

So – turning the corner, and instanteously being transported about a kilometre. That’s just impressive. The magic of TV.

Irritations

I would just like to say that I’m already utterly fucked-off and bored with the guff surrounding Euro2004. TV adverts by the sponsors (bloody Coke and Carling, mainly – and no, I’m not even going to link to them, they’ve had enough advertising already), guff in the news, and fucking St George flags already flying from car windows and windows.

I can’t deny it, I’m about as interested in football as I am in the Gross Domestic Product of Bulgaria (yes, I did look it up – God, I’m sad) so I’ll be happy when the entire Euro2004 thing is over and done with. I’m thanking all the good goblins of the North that I’ve got a new DVD player, and plenty of other stuff to be getting on with, as I’m sure most of the TV channels will be obsessed with England’s defeat progress.

But for now there’s still two weeks before it even starts, so can we please find something else to talk about?

Bladdered

hey look, I di dth eHTLM

For those who don’t know, Gert sometimes writes a post while drunk. Last nights post is a perfect illustration of this.

Two Days Time

Has anyone else watched the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow, the new disaster movie by Roland Emmerich. About halfway through, look at the text at the bottom of the screen. Bear in mind it’s a disaster movie.

Caution : contains scenes of extended peril.

No shit – it’s a fucking disaster film, you cretinous bunch of faceless nanny-state bureaucrats. What the fuck else is going to be in it?

I don’t know why, but we seem to have developed this extra rating system (and yes, I’ve blethered about this before, but it still drives me crackers on a regular basis) for which there is NO BLOODY NEED WHATSOEVER. It’s a 12A, so we know there’s going to be hardly any swearing, and not much of interest. (well, except plenty of dead Americans, so that’s a plus point) What the frig is the point of telling people extra about the content? Next they’ll be warning me that Harry Potter 3 contains scenes of magic , wizarding and fantastic creatures.

CPS

The CPS should change its name from Crown Procrastination Prosecution Service to Completely Pisspoor Scumbags after this story. A man in a Leicester court has been told – in public court – that he has HIV. He had no knowledge of this beforehand, and had never been tested.

Instead, a blood sample he’d given in a different case had somehow been kept, and then tested without his permission or knowledge.

The Terrence Higgins Trust, one of the biggest Aids charities in the UK, said the blunder was appalling. “To be tested for HIV without your consent is absolutely wrong,” it said. “To hear the results in court is just appalling. To find out you have a life-threatening disease and didn’t even know you were being tested is appalling. It goes against all your rights of confidentiality.”

Apalling doesn’t even come close – there’s no words strong enough for how amazingly bad this entire thing is.

Doctors

Does your doctor wear a tie? A story in today’s Guardian claims that well-dressed doctors may be a health-risk. Personally, I thought that doctors were a health-risk anyway, but that’s by the by.

While there is no direct evidence to implicate neckties in the transmission of infection to patients, the link between contaminated necktie and the potential for transmission must be considered.

Well, it made me laugh anyway…

Meeting with Bankers

At last, that seems to be over and done with. I went to see the new business manager at the bank previously known as “useless” which actually went well. It turns out my ex-business manager hasn’t just moved branches or offices, she’s actually been sacked. They say misconduct, I say “incompetence”.

Anyway, we’ve cleared up a lot of the old issues, and dealt with most of the crap around The Stop That Wasn’t from a couple of weeks ago. I’ve told them that we’ll start again from now, I won’t harp back over old problems, and they’ve promised to do better and be more professional with their dealings with me.

We’ll see how it goes, but for now, thank christ, it’s over and done with.

Poms

I know I’ve ranted about this before, but it still drives me barmy. (And I can’t be arsed to hunt for earlier postings about it) I simply don’t understand the people who chose to live in a place, then complain about the noise. The newly christened Britain’s noisiest house backs onto a tram-line, and registers about 95dB. Fair enough, that’s loud – but the current occupants have been there for three years, and the tram line has been there for about ten. The tram was there way before they moved in, yet they still piss and moan, and enter themselves in this competition in order to complain.

In a similar story, a whining bastard has moved near Manchester’s Night and Day bar, a well known venue. They moved in less than a year ago – Night&Day has been there for thirteen years – and is now complaining about the noise, which may force the venue to close, or limit itself to bands with only one or two members.

In both cases, established items are being complained about by people who’ve moved into a new home completely aware (or at least they should be completely aware – if not, they’re just utter fuckheads and deserve everything they get) of what’s around them, or at the end of the garden. If I were to move anywhere, I’d want to visit the new place at different times, and do some research about the area – that way you find out about things like sewage farms, tram/train-lines, football stadiums, nightclubs, music venues, whatever. That seems to be simple logic – but of course that’s beyond most people.

And while I remember, I don’t have a problem with it (as much) when the people have been there before the noise-source, and are then complaining. Fair enough, although they should have also pissed and moaned at planning meetings etc. At least I can understand it when that’s the problem – but not when people move into somewhere with an established noise source or whatever.

</rant>

A Good Idea?

This should definitely be filed under “Idea, Bloody Stupid”.

The Jaguar F1 team decided to get involved in promoting a film during the Monaco Grand Prix at the weekend. Both Jaguar cars had a £140,000 flawless diamond embedded in the nosecone. Sounds like a good news-worthy plan so far?

Except Christian Klein, one of the drivers, crashed – and the diamond disappeared. All of a sudden, it’s not sounding like such a smart plan. No-one knows where the stone is – and I love the quote from the Guardian’s coverage of the story.

“Someone here has walked away with more than a motor racing souvenir.”

Tied Up

via BSAG, I found one of the oddest, and geekiest pages around. Secure knots for shoelaces. I can say nothing else on this matter…

The M-Word

Dear God preserve us all, it’s Monday. For the first time in ages I’m beginning to develop a deep dislike of Mondays. Things just seem to happen, with no good reason.

Last week the powers-that-be decided that the contractors working for them are basically untrustworthy. So now, as well as the timesheet I fill in for the agency (of which the council gets two copies) and and timesheet I fill in within my particular department, I now have to fill in another one which supposedly lists all the time I spend in and out of the office, and also what time I spend on each particular piece of work for the council. Yup, three timesheets. Never let it be said that local authorities are short on bureaucrats and bean-counters.

Of course there’s a problem with this – well actually, there are several. In the spirit of cross-department communication, the two “official” council timesheets manage to be completely different – not just in format and appearance, but even down to the method of time notation. On one you type in the proper time, i.e. “9:20”. On the other, it has to be expressed as a fraction, i.e. “9.33333”. And the two will never add up to the same hours. The one I’ve been using just does (for example) 9:30 to 13:00, 13:30 to 16:30 = 6½ hours. Simple. The other one will end up as 9.5 – 10.75, 10.8 – 13.0, 13.5 – 16.5 = close to 6½, but not quite, because I stepped out of the office to make a phone call. But – and this is where it gets fun – because the fucknuggets want all three timesheets to add up to the same figures.

Mission Improbable.

Geek-o-rama

It had to happen sometime. Westminster Council has started installing CCTV cameras that use a wireless (WiFi) network, instead of hardwired lines. So far it’s only being trialled in Soho, but I can see that it’ll be taken up on a far wider scale before long.

It’s far more cost effective than installing fixed hard-wired cameras, and also means that should it be discovered that they’re in the wrong place, or just need more, it’s a comparatively easy task to sort it out. Supposedly council workers will also be able to use the entire thing as part of a WAN (Wide Area Network) and do their work outside. Knowing local authorities, I wonder how long it’ll be ’til some nice person uses AirSnort to try and get into the network.

There are definite security issues with this kind of thing. Unless the WAN sits in a buffer zone (and again, that pre-assumes IT staff with decent knowledge of wireless networking etc.) then it’ll be possible for unauthorised people to get into the entire council network. Also, it means that the CCTV images will be being transmitted through the air, and are thus catchable (and perhaps editable) by anyone with the right equipment.

It used to be that “with the right equipment” in this context meant “security services”, but now it could be anyone. Even my little laptop has the power and ability to sniff a wireless network, and figure out passwords etc. I know it has, because I’ve done it. (*ahem* only when authorised to do so, of course *cough*) So – in theory at least – it may just be pretty easy to get onto that part of the network. I think it’s something I’m going to have a go at next time I’m down in London…

Weekend Off – Part 2

God, I chose a good weekend to do nothing. It’s been glorious sunny all weekend, and I’ve spent the time mainly outside, going brown. If I’d been in town today, I’d have been limited by the joys of The Great Manchester Run, and quite honestly I didn’t want to be in crowds and so on. So I’ve been happy just outside, reading, catching up on letters and so on.

Next weekend I’ve got The Parents^™ here, so having a break this weekend has probably been an exceptionally good thing. I know I feel a lot more relaxed, and I’ve caught up on some sleep and headspace, and feel about 1000&percent; better than I did during the week.

Now it’s just “looking forward” to Monday. Oh goody…

Passionate

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking more and more at people who are passionate about what they do, and have an obvious love of their chosen work. Seeing Michael Marshal Smith and Nicholas Royle was part of that – as I said yesterday, two men who are successful, and love their work. In today’s Guardian (and also in last week’s and next week’s) there have been photos by the photographer Stephen Gill. To me, this man’s work is fascinating – he takes portraits in series, for example of people lost in London and asking for directions, or (from this week’s Guardian) people on one particular train. I love quirky series like this, particularly when it involves normal members of the public, and facets of their lives.

I find myself really quite in awe of people this passionate about their work. In general it seems to mainly involve the more creative disciplines (and it’s just taken me a minute to think of the word “discipline” there) although it can include so many different things – even websites and blogging can be part of that passion, in the right hands. It’s still comparatively rare to see, but to me seeing that obvious passion is a wonderful thing.

Weekend Off

Oh wow, this is nice. For the first time since Easter, and I think perhaps the third weekend this year, I’ve got a weekend off. Fan-bloody-tastic. I can’t deny, I’m still busy – already I’ve been shopping, sorted out some financial stuff, bought a couple of new flower pots (and planted the fuchsias in them – they’re looking happier already) and taken some photos for a new idea/collection I’m wanting to do.

There’s things I could’ve been doing this weekend – and I still could’ve ended up in about four different locations – but yes, for now I’m happy with doing nothing (or at least as close to it as I get) for the first time in ages.

Book Geek revisited

As Dragon asked, “How was it then?” – it was good. As it turned out, it wasn’t just Michael Marshall Smith doing a reading/signing, but also Nicholas Royle, who I must admit I’d not previously heard of, let alone read any of his novels. However, if the sense of humour he displayed during the reading and Q&A session is also in his writing, then I’ll be rectifying that very soon.

MMS was interesting again – he speaks with a very dry humour, and makes for an entertaining Q&A performance. Oh, and in terms of “what does he look like?” (as asked last weekend) last night I kept on being reminded very much of a slightly better-groomed Kevin Bacon. (which was odd, as I then came home and watched Wild Things on C4) I still find it interesting the way different writers work, and how some of them are really quite shy about their books, and about reading from them (Donna Tartt was a prime case in point) whereas others such as MMS seem to love doing it, answering questions from people who obviously know and love books, and really meeting their readers. Both writers answered the questions thoughtfully and raised a variety of interesting points (including the “day from hell” for MMS where he was talking to a cousin who only read one book a year, had picked up the new novel, but wouldn’t read it yet because otherwise he wouldn’t have anything to read on holiday) and thankfully the questions were more than just the standard ‘meet the author’ dreck. In fact, both authors were quite disparaging of cliché-ridden questions. “That was almost ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ wasn’t it?” was used at one point. Instead, questions ranged from their writing methods and “normal” days, through to whether having supermarkets stocking books was a good or bad thing.

For the princely sum of £3 (and even that’s refundable against book price if you’re not a completely sad sod and didn’t buy the book on day of publishing. *ahem*) it was an excellent opportunity to spend two hours in the company of two people who blatantly love what they do, and have a truly infectious passion for it. And that’s got to be value for money.

Shudder

There are many things I could say about Treasure Pebbles, but most of them would be on the wrong side of the upcoming sweary filter, and knowing my luck I’d slag off something that everyone else thought was lovely and cute and blah, blah, blah.

Instead, I’ll just leave you with the link. (And we won’t notice that the page title doesn’t match the site name – that’d just be pedantic)

Mugs

Not content with the mugs I was doing myself, The Register has a few of their own that have been added to my “want” list. “Don’t lie – the computer didn’t ‘just do it’!” would be ideal, or “I know there is porn on your computer”.

Hmm, I wonder if I can twadge about and get some d4d™ variants?

Book Geek

Over the last few years, one of my consistently favourite authors has been Michael Marshall Smith. (or, for his last two books, Michael Marshall) Tonight he’s doing a reading and signing in Manchester Waterstones, so I’ll be there. Very sad and geeky (and even more so when you realise this’ll be the third time I’ve been at one of his readings) but it should still be interesting. Who knows, I may even get photos…

Re-connection

One thing that’s been good this week (and it’s in the minority, it has to be said) has been getting back in touch with a couple of friends who I haven’t seen or spoken to in a while. Mainly through being crap and manically busy, but that’s still no real excuse. MS Turd Word eating a six-page letter to one of them that I’d been writing over the weekend didn’t help – completely unrecoverable (Gawd knows, I’ve tried) so it’s been back to square one with it.

However, in the same vein, I also got contacted by an ex last night that I really could’ve done without. Two years on, and still there’s unresolved stuff there. I knew I’d taken her off the friends list on Messenger, but I’d forgotten to put her ID on ignore as well. Maybe that’s for the best, maybe it’s not – for now it’s just a nagging feeling of business still unfinished. Grrrr. I need sleep, that’ll let me get on with stuff in a saner fashion.

Do I?

After a week of shitey nights (put it this way, I’ve completed Redemption Ark (700ish pages) and Altered Carbon just while laying in bed) I’m currently in a seriously ratty mood.

Now – do I contact the bank I call FuckNugget (thanks Iain) today, as it’s now four days past their “we’ll call you back on Monday” bollocks, and the appointment I wanted to make with my new business manager still hasn’t happened? Or should I leave it ’til it’s a full week since they said they’d call, by which time I may have had some sleep, and be in a slightly more reasonable frame of mind?

UPDATED : Well, I’ve called them, and the useless twat is constantly engaged. So instead I’ve dropped him in the shit with his boss, my new business manager, by enquiring whether it’s the bank’s policy to never return phone calls, nor to do as promised. I’m also going to meet her on Tuesday morning, which should be interesting. And I didn’t swear once… I must be ill.

Referrer

OK, this is an odd one. In the last week or so, I’ve started getting a load of referrals from something called ibisweb.co.uk. I’d link to it, but it’s coming up with a “site under development” page. However, there’s something there, and it’s passworded – so go on, what’s this link from ibisweb, and who’s doing it?

Thanks

Eh?

Apparently, an advert for Galaxy chocolate is racist. Sorry, what? The “racially insensitive” rhyme on the advert is “eeny, meeny, miney, mo”, which I can only see as offensive to the Three Stooges.

But no, the problem is the line that follows the rhyme. Yes, that’s right – the line that’s not fucking featured in the advert. It’s not there, but somehow it’s still racist- because the line can (in one version) contain a pejorative starting with “N” and a now non-favourite of Ron Atkinson, although there’s also the version containing “fishy” or “tiger”.

Oh, and why am I circling round the word? Because in every other media circle it seems to be a grand excuse (and of course non-offensive, “because it’s news”) to keep the word in print for just a bit longer. Which I find more offensive than the word itself.

Attention

Stinky®, my direct boss, is still not stinky. Since he went off on holiday, he’s been non-stinky. I suspect that the mates he was travelling with have “had words”, and introduced the word hygiene to his lexicon.

Thankfully, he still has plenty of other equally irritating habits. The one that’s currently getting on my tits is the attention-seeking laugh. It’s utterly false, sounds more like a hiccough with pretensions, but is custom designed to make people around him ask “what’re you laughing at?”. It’s gigantically annoying, and if he continues with it he may get my attention while I slowly throttle the life out of him. The twat.

Sweary Filter

Regarding yesterday’s post about a sweary filter, Iain asks :

how will scunthorpe, sparse, saturday, spatchcock, titter, swank, and the other words that contain naughty ones be handled?

The simple answer is : Badly.

While not ideal, I’ll probably do a replace on ” *swearyword* ” (i.e. with spaces either side) which will alleviate a lot of the problems of being contained in other words. The other search/replace would be for ” *certain sweary words*ing” for those that need it. Other than that, keff it. Also, a lot of the more advanced website filters now cater for words like Scunthorpe, Essex, etc., and that’ll be their own look-out.

Of course, any ideas would be happily ignored received of how it could be done better. But bear in mind, I don’t want ultra-complex functions that slow down the rendering of the page too much. (Although if I have a particularly sweary week, it might take some time anyway)

Development

Well, it’s getting there. The “redesign” now has a working colour-switcher, which seems to be working fine, except for one piece of idiot-proofing I need to figure out. I’m sure it’s just an != instead of an == somewhere, but I’d like to have it sussed out.

The other new bit is a sweary-filter. Mike over at Troubled Diva pointed out a while back that d4d™ is likely to be blocked from a lot of places because of it’s rather higher-than-average sweary count. Last week I was working my brain over this while thinking about WordPress and the like, and found myself thinking that actually PHP was just about ideal for this kind of thing, as it meant that I could process the text in each entry before it even got to a web-filter. Therefore, if the “non-sweary” cookie is set, the plan is that the page will come through with substitutions for sweary-words.

In theory this shouldn’t be difficult – as with most things PHP-related, I’ve pretty much got the code sorted in my head, I just haven’t written the function yet. What I’d really like, though, is rather than just having “****ing ****”, which gets boring, having a “Mid-80’s BBC dubbing” over the swearwords, á la Harry Enfield’s “Fun you, you Muddy Funster”. So – what words would my faithful readers suggest for pure comedy value instead of swearies?

Accounts

I’ve decided that of all the people it’s worth holding a particular loathing in one’s heart for, it’s fucking beancounters accountants. And Accounts departments in general. Today has been a case in point.

As most people know, I’m an IT contractor. The agency I’m currently working through prefers timesheets and invoices to be submitted either weekly or fortnightly – which suits me fine. Two weeks ago (and having looked back I’m amazed I didn’t write about this at the time) they didn’t pay me, because I’d managed to fail basic maths, and added up the time-sheet incorrectly. The total was right, and the invoice matched the total hours. But the daily hours added up to a ¼hour more than I’d invoiced for. Yes, I was doing myself out of money – money that, I should point out, came to less than £5 even including VAT – but they pulled the entire amount until it was checked/altered. Petty, but there we go.

At the time I was annoyed by the fact that the accounts department didn’t actually bother saying anything until I called them to find out why I hadn’t been paid – but then they paid the amount by CHAPS on the same working day, so all was unfucked sorted. However, because accounts systems are shite, they then tried paying me for the same invoice last week, as well as the week I’d validly worked. Then they realised what they’d done, and pulled the entire payment – not just the one they’d chuffed, but the one they hadn’t as well. (Which, in fairness, is normal – you can’t pull back half a BACS payment) And then didn’t repay the half that was valid.

I’ve just spent two hours arguing with the agency, because their initial call-centre contacts insisted I’d been paid, until we finally got the name of the person who’d actually pulled the BACS payment – and when contacted, his response of “Oh, Shit” communicated clearly the fact that he’d pulled the payment, and forgotten to re-do the proper payment.

It’s sorted now (well, it’s in the process of being sorted) but the accounts department are definitely high on the “useless bastards” list at the moment. The frustrating part has been their utter inability to communicate with anyone. When I spoke to my contact at the agency, she knew absolutely keff all about it, which is never good when there’s a potential to be on the sharp end of someone going ballistic because they haven’t been paid. Fortunately, on this occasion I wasn’t ballistic, because I knew they’d screwed it up. (Plus I find that it’s healthier to be nice to the people who are paying me.) But if it had been someone else, it could’ve been a lot nastier…

Blogroll

It’s not much, but a couple of links have either moved or been deleted from the blogroll, and a couple more have been added in.

Sarah (Not You, The Other One) is off to Greece ’til November, so NYTOO is on hiatus ’til then. Hope all goes well, and that you have a good time.

New-ish additions are The Report Card, by Mr Teacher, and Never A Toss, who have both migrated from bookmarks to blogrolls.

Fothermucker

It’s just occurred to me – if I’m doing the colour-switching stuff (for which I’ve currently said Arseholes to it, and just done multiple stylesheets) then I’m going to have to alter the comments css to reflect that as well, aren’t I? Bugger.

UPDATED : Actually, something else has just occurred : I’m going to be using WordPress, and that’s got its own comments system, so I shouldn’t actually have to re-do it for Haloscan. Yay me!

Fluntcaps

Grrr, just when the re-design idea was going so well, I’ve hit a wall. I’m sure it’s something simple, but my brain’s just going “Wibble” at it.

It’s this flummin’ colour switcher – see the hassles I go through for you people? Gah. What I want, in an ideal situation, is one CSS file, which then pulls the colour from a PHP variable. Doesn’t sound too complex, does it?

However, CSS files don’t appear to like PHP variables. And doing the CSS file as a .php doesn’t seem to be happy either. Am I missing something hugely relevant?

Wakey Wakey

Coming home last night (delayed train, blah blah, still whacked, and can’t be arsed to rant about it – although cellphone coverage is another story and may well be rantable about in the very near future) I actually found myself scared by a taxi driver. Yeah, some of them can be pretty bloody dodgy in the first place, but that doesn’t worry me – however, this one was something else.

I’d told him where I wanted to go, we set off, and he ‘drove’ straight past the normal junction.

Fair enough, it’s had some issues with a burning warehouse in the last couple of weeks, it’s a Sunday, they could be diverting traffic while pulling it down or whatever. The next junction connects to the required road too… Oh, we’ve zoomed past that too. And wasn’t that traffic light on red?

Then I looked at the driver. He was asleep. Cue that fear-reaction of the slightly loosened sphincter.

I yelled at him, he woke up, realised he’d been sleeping, took me back to Piccadilly (it wasn’t far), didn’t charge me, and I got a different cab home. But chuff me, for a couple of moments there, I was almost liable for a cleaning fee for that cab…

Spitting Image

Apparently, it’s possible that Spitting Image will make a return to TV screens. It would take a fair amount of money to get the show back (“a seven figure investment would be needed”) as all the puppets would have to be re-made and so on – but I know I’d love to see the show come back.

And I can only dream of what they’d make of Blair, Prescott, Brown et al.

Blogrolling Redux

Further to what I was saying on Saturday about Blogrolling being a bit up it, I’ve just read their News section, and it turns out that yes, there was a whacking big crash, and an upgrade that happened about a week earlier than it should’ve done.

Fair play to them, and it seems to be back up and running OK again.

Redesign Questions

OK, I’ve got a fair amount of the basics done for a redesign of d4d™. It’s not too radical (hey, I’m sad, and still like the basic *cough* “design” of the site) at first sight, but there’s a lot of new stuff in the background.

But now comes the techie part – concentrate! Further to various comments (you know who you are) while I’m used to the yellow, it’s still offensive (and non-work-subtle) for many people, so I’m going to bite the bullet and create a colour-switcher. There are two options for it.

One : Use a cookie-based system. While this won’t hold any personal data (and in fact is likely to just hold a value for a PHP variable name) what I need to know is how many people would be OK with accepting cookies, whether more people have them turned off than on, that kind of thing.

Two :The second option is somewhat subtler, but in concept perhaps slightly more intrusive. I’m thinking of using a database, listing the IP address, and any colour choice listed against that IP. This is well geeky, and I’m currently on theory-only concept, but it would mean that people reading d4d™ from work wouldn’t need to worry about cookies. Again, no further personal data would be held – it would purely be “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx : Blue”, but how do people feel about that as a concept?

And given the choice, which would you prefer?

Berkshire

Ah, that was a grand weekend. Meeting people I’ve wanted to for quite a while, coupled with beer, a garden, Trivial Pursuit, barbeque, and loads of sun. Oh, and some idiot banter, and a couple of epic faux pas, for which I’ve apologised already. (Bless you, my child) Everyone was great, and it’s been an utter pleasure to meet them.

And then today was more sun and garden, then meeting up with one of my oldest friends (old as in “duration of friendship”, not as in “years”) for lunch and general putting the world to rights. Of course, the four-plus hour train-ride home wasn’t much fun, but I still got some stuff done, and now I’m home and utterly knackered.

Ah yes

Ah, that was it. Is it me, or is BlogRolling having problems registering when a page has been altered? I normally use their ping page in order to make sure d4d™ comes up as updated, but since Thursday apparently none of the blogs I read have changed. Which doesn’t sound right at all.

Brain-spasm

Don’t you just hate it when you know you were wanting to write something, and whatever it was just dive-bombs right out of your brain again? That’s what’s just happened.

I’d got something in my head to write about, then the landlord came round for a flying visit – as predicted, it really was a “check the walls are all there, and that nothing’s been trashed” walkthrough – and I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to gibber about. It’s frustrating. I’ll remember what it was halfway down the line to Berkshire, and then forget again just in time to post it.

Blah

There are times I hate living in Manchester. Went to bed at about 2am – OK, that one I can’t pin on Manchester, particularly. By 3am there was some off-his-head scallie wandering around on the street outside yelling into his phone (I assume) and being a pain in the arse.

Eventually a passing police car stops and basically asks him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, particularly as he was also wobbling down the center of a fairly busy road. Knobby then assumes that someone called the police, and proceeds to spend the next two hours walking up and down kicking on gates and walls, throwing stuff at doors, that kind of thing. At this point logic would dictate “i’m doing this and no-one’s called the police back, so perhaps they didn’t when I was just being a loud obnoxious gobshite” – but no, with various yells and bashes, the entire street is getting hassle for (I assume) broaching his human rights to be a cunt at 3am.

Eventually someone obviously did call the plods back (can’t think who that might’ve been. Honest. *whistles innocently*) at which point they bounced his head off the door of the police car. 5 am. I’ve had three hours sleep. And once my fucking useless darling lovely landlords have visited to check I haven’t blown the place up, I’m off down to Berkshire. In short, right now, I’m fit for fuck all.

Bye

It had to happen, really – Piers Morgan has left the Mirror.

Successful

It’s been a pretty good day, all things considered. Compared to what a complete rancid ballsup yesterday was, this has definitely been calm after the storm. And not a blockquote in sight

• WordPress downloaded, installed, and basically set up. Check
• Photo portfolio CD and images done, on both CD and prints. Check

(by the way, 7’x5′ prints fit perfectly in a DVD case, if you’re sending them with a disc)

• Portfolio and covering letter posted Check
• Necessary birthday cards bought, written, and posted Check
• Invoice completed, signed, and posted Check
• d4d™ redesign and upgrade begun Check

Yes, it’s been a good day.

And so it continues

Hmmm, I think that with this redesign malarkey, I may actually take a semi-retrograde step. One thing that’s bugged me since I put CSS into d4d™ has been the right hand box, and the way it cuts off. It’s trivial, but it annoys me.

So, rather than doing a pure CSS template, I think I’m going to have a hack about, and use a basic table to hold everything in place, and then the main content will still be CSS styled. I’m just not going to use absolute positioning for everything, because it’s a pain in the arse. In theory it also might make the transfer of old pages a bit easier to – simply plugging the content out of its current table cells, and slapping it into a new template. That’s the current thinking, anyway.

In addition, I’m going to use some include files, so that I don’t have to nork about with loads of file changes next time I do this. (And yes, if I carry on d4d, there’ll be at least one more redesign) I’ll probably do a lot of work on this over the weekend – I’ve a shedload of travelling planned again, so it’s likely that I’ll have enough opportunity to get quite a bit done in that time.

Monday may prove interesting…

1,700

Chuff. According to my new toy, the Blogger profile, this is the 1,700th post here on d4d™ Somewhere just north of 202,000 words, and somewhere in the region of 180,000 page views. Not bad going at all. I wonder where the future will lead? Particularly regarding the contents of the 1,699th post, just below…

And so it starts

Yes, after a long time bleating on about considering it, I’ve finally installed WordPress, and started work on a new template etc. So far, so good. It’ll be interesting over the next few days (OK, week or so) while I try and find some inspiration on a re-design too.

What started it off in earnest? An idea I had yesterday, which may or may not work, but will certainly be interesting. Well, assuming my PHP “skills” are up to it, of course. They should be – the idea’s simple, but will look pretty clever.

For now, I don’t think a redesign will be anything huge. The extension for this page will have to change to .php, which will keff half the links in people’s blogrolls. Ooops. Ah well, I’ll let everyone know when it happens. Initially at least, the yellow won’t be going, nor will it be toning down. I’ve thought about it long and hard *hello Google* but it’s kind of grown on me, it’s distinctive. I may work on a colour switcher though…

As for the rest of it – I don’t know yet what I’ll end up with. The navigation bits are going to change, this much I know. How much they’ll change, I don’t know. That’s some of what I’ll probably be doing over the weekend – just having a think, and a fiddle. The side-problem is that the rest of d4d™ isn’t content managed, so anything I do will then have to propagate over the other hundred-odd pages manually. Bollocks, that was bad planning…

Twadge

In my head I’ve been putting together the code for a nice smooth slideshow type functionality for the portfolio I’m assembling. (I know, I’m putting in a lot of work for something I’m 99% sure I won’t get anywhere close to) As well as normal 7′ x 5′ prints (which came yesterday, and I’m well chuffed with them) I want to put in a CD – the originals are all digital images, so it seems to make sense.

Anyway, I’d come up with a nice bit of PHP scripting to do all this, and do it from one html/php page, rather than 15 static pages. All very nice, using variables, and a loop so that once it’d shown the last picture it looped round to the first and so on.

The observant amongst you (or the geeky) will have already noticed the flaw in this plan. It’s a problem I’ve only just realised, and I’m now battering my head into the desk for being such a complete twadgeknacker.

The Problem? : I can’t just run a PHP page of a CD. It would need me to know that PHP was installed on the recipients PC, as well as a web server. So it’s back to plan A, and static html pages that’ll load straight off the disc.

Gah.

BM5 – Genteel

Well, that was a quiet blogmeet. Not even a Topper to abuse. And with a distinct lack of North-Eastern influence (you know who you are) as well, it was quite different.

Font was OK, but a shit band were about to start, so we hoyed off to Eden on Canal Street instead. Leather Sofas, as well as Grolsch and Guinness on draught – sounds like a plan to me.

Conversation wavered between having a Mongol dog (“Down, Syndrome! Down!”), christian bands, bowel movements, bureaucrats, songs called “Fuck you, you fucking cunt”, PHP filters on content management, and a whole range of stuff that I’ve forgotten about. Definitely a fun evening – but we need to drag more people out for the next one.

Repetition

Sometimes it’s almost like I’ve become Multilingual, and particularly while talking to numbnut marmosets from the bank that likes to have circular conversations. I swear that at one point I must have been speaking fluent Serbo-Croat, because nothing I was saying was sinking in at all.

The highpoint of the entire conversation went as follows (and sorry for the multitude of blockquote boxes in the last couple of days – it just happens like that sometimes)

OK, I want you to repeat these things after me – just to prove they’re getting received
*doubtful* “OK…..“
The problem is not with my Internet Banking login
“The problem is not with your Internet Banking login“
The problem is with my business account
“The problem is with your business account“
The problem is within your system – one section says my account is fine, the other one doesn’t.
“The problem is within our system – one section says the account is fine, the other doesn’t.“
Close enough. Now, has that sunk in?
“Well, sir, like I was saying, we need you to log in to your internet banking so that we can see what error it comes up with. After that I’ll have to refer you back to the business managers, who’ll order you a new card“

*sob*

Training course

Following on from yesterday’s sweary, Daisy commented about her own recent Lyle-esque rant…

Me: Hometown, 1234–
Her: Hello Daisy, I’m pleased to tell you that you’ve won the competition for a–
Me: Shut. Up. First of all, how DARE you ring my home and address me by my first name.
Two – I do NOT enter competitions, therefore you have lied to me. Three – It is ten past seven, how DARE you ring in the middle of the Archers. Do NOT ring this number again or I will take legal action.
*slams phone down*

Current status: 80% shame & guilt, 20% sneaking admiration that I had the cojones to do it.
I need more lessons please.

Now, while I have to admit that this is pretty good for a novice, there are much better ways of dealing with random phone calls. And this one’s not even likely to be sweary…

Hello [insert standard greeting here]
“Ah yes, I’m pleased to tell you you’ve won the competition for…..“
You know, you’re completely right, I have won a prize. You’ve managed to call an ex-directory number, which has also been registered with the Telephone Preference Service for the last six months.
“Oh. Um. Whoops“
Yes, whoops indeed. This means that your company is now liable for a £10,000 fine, and I’d also like to get the name and address of the company that sold you the mailing list containing my number. May I speak to your supervisor please?

No need for swearing, yet you’ve just ruined a person’s day completely. My work here is done.

Foregone conclusion

I love the way the headline for this story seems to predict the outcome. The inquiry into the now infamous “torture” photos is pretty certain to conclude that they’re fakes. Of course, this is similar to the Hutton Whitewash Report‘s conclusion that “the Government wasn’t at fault”.

Of course these photos are going to be denounced as fakes. No government inquiry into them is going to say “Oh shit, actually, they’re genuine” and thus knacker the government’s case for war, for continued military presence, or for reasons why these Iraqis are still in confinement now that the war is supposedly over.

As it is, I believe that some of the photos have been faked, but I don’t believe all of them have been. And that’s the crux of it all – if one can be proven to be faked, then it casts doubt on all the others. If one can be proven to be authentic, then it adds “reliability” to all the others. The government is hoping for the former option, and the Mirror is praying for the latter. The absolute cynic in me wonders if the faked ones haven’t been produced purely with this in mind – that the army have perhaps staged a couple that they can then say “this is the person in the photos, and the one who took/staged them” and thus discredit all the others…

RB-motherfucking-S

Readers from a year ago may just recall my problems with the bank that can’t find it’s arse with both hands and a flashlight. For my business account, I do most of the stuff via Internet Banking. This system is shonky as shite, but still rather better than, say, wandering into the branch all the time. Although not by much – I can only use it from one PC, which sort of destroys the “convenience” of banking via the Internet. Incredible – the bank that hopes to enter the 20th century. Sometime around 2056 at this rate.

I tried logging into the account this morning, only to receive an error saying that the business account wasn’t accessible via the internet. Which, to be honest, comes under the “well that’s news to me” banner. So I call the Helldesk.

Oh, the branch has put some kind of stop, or tag, or something, on the account to stop it being accessed online.
Why?
I don’t know, I don’t have those records here.
That’s useful. So what’s happened to the account, so I can at least talk to the branch and look like I know what I’m talking about. That way, at least one of us will.
Well, they’ve put some kind of stop, or marker, or something on the account. I don’t know what, exactly, I’ve never seen something like this before.
Thanks for your help

Crying now seems like a pretty good option. Come 9.15 I’m on the phone to the branch, expecting to speak to the useless cunt business manager for my account. Bear in mind, this is the person who is genetically incapable of answering emails, or writing letters. Or, in fact, of communicating with her customers at all.

Hello, can I speak to xxxxx please?
Oh, she doesn’t work here any more. Can I ask what it’s about?
Oh, that’s nice. Supposedly she’s my business manager. Good to know she’s gone though. Who’s my replacement business manager?
Oh, I don’t know. Can I help with anything?
Yeah, I’d like to know why my account is apparently blocked from being accessed via internet banking.
*time passes, with details of account etc.*
Um, according to our system it’s fine. Why did Internet Banking say it couldn’t be accessed?
Their very technical (Note to self : calm the sarcasm) explanation was that it was a marker, or stop, or something.
No, there’s nothing like that on the account.
Well, could you look into it, and find out what the chuff is going on then?. Thanks.

And now, in the spirit of eternal optimism, I’m waiting for them to call me back. Will I ever learn?

NT-motherfucking-L

Dateline : Today. Location : Oldham Shopping Centre.

“Hello Sir, can I interest you in NTL?“
*walking past* No, thanks.
*snide*”Ah well, you’ll never know what a great deal you’ve just walked away from“
*walking back*Care to repeat that?
*not so sure now* “Um, you’ll never know what a great deal you’ve just missed“
Oh, wouldn’t I? What’re you offering? Cheap calls? Whoopee doo. After my last experience with NT-fucking-L, I wouldn’t touch them with someone else’s shitty stick. The customer service sucks, the charges aren’t that cheap, the internet access is balls, NTL can’t bill correctly even with Oftel watching over them, and, frankly, their entire ‘service’ sucks the balls off dead donkeys. I’m on ADSL – can you sell me a phone service from NTL that won’t fuck that up completely?
“um. No.“
Will you refund me for what I’ve already paid on ADSL?
“No“
Do I live in an area where NTLs cable already runs, and is known to work?
“I don’t know“
No, you bloody don’t, do you? I do – they can’t do cable modems in my area, so it’s dial-up or sod all. It’s still old C&W shite, which NTL can’t use all it’s stuff on. So next time before being such a cockhead, why not try either appreciating that someone’s said “no thanks” instead of “fuck off”, don’t be snide, and get your head out of your arse.

I feel SO much better after that…

BM5

Bloody hell, the fifth one already. Yes, while I remember, the 5th Manchester Blogmeet will be happening tomorrow. Any time after 8pm, in Font (just round the corner from Oxford Road station).

It’s obviously the season for meets – as well as one last Saturday in London, there’s another one tonight. And I’m down in the wilds of Berkshire over the weekend at another smaller do – pics will probably be around on Monday of that one, and on Friday of the Manchester BM5. Be afraid…

PhotoBox

At the moment, I’m applying for an “on-the-side” job doing photographs for a rebuilding project. I’ve never done anything like it before, so it’s kind of on a wing and a prayer. I won’t blither on too much about the job itself, as I suspect that the likelihood of getting it is rather less than, say, finding myself on a flight tonight to Outer Mongolia in pursuit of a prehistoric yurt.

Anyway, last night I was burbling round what I needed to put together for this application, and I realised that a small porfolio of stuff I’ve done would be useful. So I’ve assembled 15 shots that I’m particularly proud of, or pleased with, and burned them onto a CD along with a little set of web pages to display the different images etc., all done in one page using PHP. (Yes, I’m that geeky too – sad but true)

Now, I’m slow on the uptake, and it took ’til 1am before I thought “Oh, bollocks. What if they haven’t got a PC? Best do some proper prints too”. Uploaded them to Photobox.co.uk by about 1.30am. And when I got into work this morning, there was a set of emails telling me that not only had the order been received, it had also been processed and despatched. Now that’s what I call efficient.

Garden pt. 2

Following on from Monday’s post about getting rid of greenfly, I ended up getting a completely non-organic way of killing them, and sprayed the patch garden with it yesterday. Only time will tell how ultimately successful this was.

Bon Anniversaire

It’s Anna‘s birthday tomorrow. Be nice to her. *Grin*

Dunham Massey

One thing I’d forgotten to write about from over the weekend was a visit to Dunham Massey – it was a fairly pleasant day, so spending time in gardens/house actually quite appealed, and the friends who were here had been there years before, so off we went.

Typically, for the first time in ages, I forgot to bring a camera. Twonk. One of the first things that we noticed in the grounds was a jay flying past – not overly rare, but still not something I’d seen in quite a few years.

Overall, the house was interesting – unfortunately, we’d come on a weekend when some bunch of local am-drams were attempting to “bring the house to life” via some utterly wanky little production involving costume drama scenes in some of the rooms of the house. Personally, I loathe this type of thing – I know lots of people find them useful for imagining how a house would’ve been, but I prefer to use imagination, rather than letting loose some bunch of barely-able muppets out to bob, curtsey, roll their r’s in a Noel Coward style, and generally be camper than a row of tents. I’m not a fine of these dramatisations even on TV, but when they’re in person I find myself realising why they haven’t staged any scenes in the armoury, or the study where the swords are on display. As it was, the penny-whistle player was offered the opportunity for a trip to the proctologist if he didn’t move himself forthwith. Needless to say, he shifted.

Anyway – the gardens themselves were (for me) the better part of the deal – I love a lot of that kind of thing, although the National Trust seems to have ended up with a job-lot of rhododendrons, and planted them in every NT property in the country. They’re nice, but they do get boring. However, the sheer variety of plants and trees throughout made up for the rhodie-excess. And watching shouty darling little bastards children running after squirrels yelling “Squirl!” is always good for a laugh. Particularly when that child trips on its shoelaces, and face-plants the tree. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just me that was laughing….

My old man said be a footie fan, I said…

I’m sure there are many great things about having a new Chants Laureate for football. For me, most of them involve the words “fucking”, “stupid”, and “idea”, in some order.

“What we felt we were tapping into was a huge reservoir of folk poetry”

Andrew Motion, poet laureate and panel judge

I think “folk poetry” has some managed to replace the word “bullshit” in that sentence – bloody typesetters.

Tasteful

Ah, how lovely – I’m already the No. 3 link on google for “Leslie Grantham wanking“. My parents would be so proud…

New Blogger – pt. 2

OK, some pro’s and cons. First of all, as Diamond Geezer said, new Blogger has been dumbed down quite a lot in its interface. In general I don’t mind it – at least it makes the entire thing more cross-browser – and I’m working hard to avoid the “anything new is bad” mindset so beloved of the UK.

I haven’t used the new comments system – Mike‘s said quite enough about that one for all of us on Gordon’s test blog, and it also needs/requires access to either a Blogger profile, or the commenter stays anonymous. So, despite the recent ups and downs, I’m sticking with Haloscan for the comments. So it’s an issue I don’t need to worry about. Works for me, anyway.

I’ve also just spent some time filling in my profile for one simple reason – it includes silly things like “total word count” – and mine’s over 200,000, which I reckon’s not bad over eighteen months. (And in a fit of bizarreness, I just tried working out 200,000/18 for an average monthly word count, and it’s come out as 11,111.11111recurring – Yes, I need to get out more)

Oh, and one other thing I like – knowing my propensity for quoting other people, and news stories etc., there’s now the ability to add in a <blockquote> with one mouse-click. Of course I’ll probably forget, and just type it anyway, but it’s a nice little addition.

In general I think that the new Blogger’s OK – it’ll take some time to get used to a couple of the new bits, but really for me it’s more a case of “new face, same functionality” – I didn’t use half of it anyway. And besides, if/when I update the site (possibly for the second birthday) I’m more likely to be going over to WordPress anyway.

UPDATED : Ah, there’s one other thing that’s now totally bobbins – the uploading process, with nice wanky whizzy new graphic. It informs you of fuck all, and is about as useful as a kick in the ‘nads.

Green

Sheesh, I never expected to be asking something like this – and it’ll give a whole new view on Lyle-World™.

So – does anyone know of a decent (and ideally fairly eco-friendly) way of getting rid of an infestation shitloads of greenfly? My perfect answer would be a load of ladybirds, but they don’t tend to appreciate things like boundaries, roads, and “I bought them”. But it’s still a nice idea. However, in lieu of some strange place that sells ladybirds by the dozen, any other suggestions?

Cheers.

Blogger All This

Oooh, very pretty. Blogger has revamped and made itself a lot prettier. Also, it’s a lot happier in a cross-browser sense. At last, it even works in Opera! (maybe it’s worked in Opera for other people no worries, but for me it was an utter bastard) Yup, I could get used to it – and bloody hell, have I really written more than 1600 entries on d4d™? I need to get out more.

Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins”
Manchester Palace Theatre

Among other reasons for this presentation to be interesting, it was the first amateur production and also funded in part by a win from “Weakest Link”. It’s also not a show that’s performed very often – and having seen the content matter, I can see why.

I’m not overly familiar with the assassins of American presidents – and even less so with those who attempted it, but failed. And those things are the entire basis of Assassins. Nine people, including John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley) and of course Lee Harvey Oswald. But there’s also details about the attempted assassination of President Ford in 1975 by two members of the Manson family, and the attempted killing of Nixon by Samuel Byck (by flying a 747 into the White House) – plots I honestly didn’t know anything about.

The entire show is – perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the subject matter – exceptionally dark, yet it still has pearls of dark humour. The basic concept of “you can change the world, just by pulling the trigger” is a troublesome one, but still valid, and the finale of this show, leaving an image of George W Bush on the background, illustrates that there’s still potential for it to happen again.

All told, it was a sensational show – but not entertaining. It came across as professionally done and was excellent – I was sorry to see that the theatre was only about a third full. The tickets were about a third of the price of the standard rate, and yet they still weren’t taken up. For a show of this quality, the tickets should’ve have been closer to normal rates, which perhaps would have persuaded people that it was a “proper” show, as opposed to an “amateur” one. Going in cold, nothing about the entire thing was amateur – it didn’t show at all. Overall, an exceptionally good evening, and well worth the money.

Gigs, Redux

It’s one of those redux days today, obviously. Bit weird, but there we go. I said on Wednesday about limiting the number of concerts i’m going to go to for the rest of this year, and then on Thursday it was announced that Simon & Garfunkel were doing a reunion tour. Two dates in the UK – one in Hyde Park, one in Manchester – and tickets went on sale today. At £76 a pop. When you include booking fee and handling, it comes out to nearly £90 per ticket for anything resembling a decent view.

Frankly, chuff that.

Disinterested, Redux

Remember back on 28th April when I was pissed off with the farce surrounding the Oldham Beyond project? Basically, none of the relevant organisations had seemed to give a sod about the report, and the release of it turned into a farce reminiscent of the Marx Brothers.

Urbed, the main organisation, now has it on their homepage, Oldham Council has finally mentioned it, and the Northwest Development Agency eventually got round to mentioning it , although it’s not on their front page.

All in all it’s been an utter farce, but at least they seem to be getting somewhere with it now.

Hurry Up and Leave

I’m pretty sure I’ll be in the minority on this, but I can’t deny it, I’m truly pleased that Friends is finally coming to a close. The last epsiode goes out in the US this week, and it’s expected to be so popular that the advertising slots in the programme are being sold at $2m for 30 seconds, second only to the Superbowl for advertising cost. I’m not sure of when it’ll be transmitted on E4/C4 (and can’t you tell that I really don’t care all that much?) but I suspect that the advert rate will be significantly higher here too.

Personally, I’ve never been able to get into the entire “Friends” thing – as a programme it annoys me significantly more than it makes me laugh, and that’s something that means I can’t be overly bothered about the entire thing. While I obviously understand that sitcoms and comedies aren’t generaly meant to be based in the real world, to me the entire pantheon of the Friends universe was so unreal as to be unbelievable, and again that just ended up being irritating. I won’t be sorry to see it go.

Except of course it won’t go – there’ll be at least one spin-off series (as Cheers did with Frasier), the potential for a couple of “specials” (a la Only Fools and Horses) and of course the inevitable continual repeats and reruns that’ll keep the stars in royalties and repeat-fees for decades to come.

Mutter/Snarl

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Gigs

Tonight I was supposed to be out at a concert, seeing the Barenaked Ladies. However, as has happened before this year, I haven’t gone. I’m not in the mood for being in a crowded room with 2,500ish people, not in the mood to enjoy a gig, and really just too tired exhausted to want to go out.

I’ve got tickets for one more gig this year, and one theatre performance. After those, I don’t know what I’m going to do – burn-out’s still here, hanging over my shoulder, laughing in my ear. I need to open up some of my time again, not keep on thrashing myself and my life. So for the next while, I think I’m only going to sort anything out for gigs I specifically want to see – but definitely take a break for a couple of months. Luckily, we’re just getting into festival season, which is something I’m not overly interested in, so it’ll be easy enough to take that time out. After that, we’ll just have to see how things go.

Unmotivated

It’s been one of those days – subzero motivation, utter boredom, and really can’t be arsed to do anything. I just want to sleep, in fact.

So I’m going to go home, and work on things from there.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Desktops

In a fit of utter boredom today, I decided to re-do the desktop on my work computer. Because the pieces of shite computers at work don’t like Active Desktop^® (and let’s face it, who does?) I can’t use the same desktop as at home, which constantly runs xEarth. Instead, it’s down to taking a couple of images that have been jpgs and making them into .bmps (thanks to Photoshop, this isn’t a challenge)

Anyway, I’ve now cropped and resized a couple of the photos from the weekend, and I’m currently working on deciding which I prefer.

I’ve linked both of them here to .jpgs, so should anyone else want to use them, feel free. You may need to swap them to .bmps (or email me and I’ll send the bmp versions) if you don’t have/want Active Desktop. As yet I haven’t decided which one I’m going to use – I may swap them round on a weekly basis, or something.

And yes, that IS how bored I am today…

Attempting to care

Even while writing this, I’m wondering if it’s even worth the effort involved.

Anyway, according to the Grauniad (and apparently various other rags newspapers as well) Leslie Grantham (“Dirty Den” from übersoap Eastenders) was “caught” having cybersex. (AKA “having a wank”) Supposedly it’s a scandal – why? No-one was hurt by the actual act. (oh, apart from ‘actors’ who he talked about behind their backs, and who he’s now apologised to) No-one under-age was involved – the youngest age mentioned in the ‘story’ is 23. I don’t know if he’s married or not, but if he’s not then it’s not even as though he were having an affair.

The paper said he had a three-year relationship with a 31-year-old mother of three, which included a session in which he pleasured himself while dressed as Captain Hook during a panto season.

That image is just comedy, not porn, or explicit – and it does make me hope he used the correct hand, not the hook…

At the end of the day, he was wanking, and he showed it on his webcam – in a private conversation with a woman. We’re not talking about having it out in a chatroom, or on a website that anyone can access. I’d lay money that the woman was also on a webcam, and we’re not talking Mary Whitehouse here.

Personally, I’ve never seen the appeal in “cybersex” – when all’s said and done, it’s really just masturbation with added technology. But I don’t see the harm in it either – or at least, not when it’s between two consenting adults, when no-one’s even close to the age of consent or any dodgy issues like that. Whatever floats your boat – cybersex doesn’t float mine, but it appears to float lots of peoples. Fair enough.

But for fuck’s sake, why should this be news at all?

Shite

I’d just like to say thanks to the person who left work’s Gents toilet in a state that can only be described as repellent. Not only were they content to have splattered the entire seat and bowl with shite (they must’ve been hovering, I reckon) and stinking the place out, but they were obviously deeply proud of this, and left it as a “Look what I can do!” for the next unlucky occupant. Which was, of course, me.

So thanks a lot to the dirty, shit-stained curry fanatic who smells as though a skunk has crawled up their anal passage. You fucker.

Ratings

I’m sure that this comes under “Geekery Unlimited”, but is it only me who finds the Guardian’s “overnights” fascinating reading? (It may need you to register for the Grauniad’s services, but that’s still free) Basically it’s a daily view of who watched what last night on the five terrestrial channels, and I find I read it probably three or four times a week, even for programmes I haven’t watched.

Yes, I think it’s now certain that I really do need to get out more.

Photographica

Following on from the post over the weekend about Sulham Woods, I’ve uploaded some photos from the weekend. Enjoy.

Gay Chorus

Further to Peter‘s comments in this post, and his own thoughts on the subject (Jesus, this is getting all insular and self-referential, isn’t it?) I’ve ended up posting the following comment. There’s a lot more that still wants to be said, but my brain’s currently not stringing the words together overly well on the rest of it.

I agree that the idea of a gay chorus is somewhat segregationist. I know that the argument that’s been thrown about previously when people have said “why is there a *insert specialist section* *insert occupation* group, when there’s not a straight/white/whatever one?” The answer that made most (although still not a lot) sense was that the straight/white/whatever ones had been around for years/decades (the particular context I’m thinking of was about a Miss Black America, a beauty contest for African-Americans (I hate that phrase too)) and had already proved themselves to be segregationist.

However, just because “it’s already been done the other way” doesn’t make it right. I’ve never understood the entire ghettoisation process (is that a word?) where there are areas such as Manchester’s Gay Village – I can understand the need for an area where people can feel safe, but in an ideal world, that shouldn’t be necessary either. But so many of the gay men I know refuse to drink anywhere that’s not in “the Gay village”, which to me just limits the opportunities to get out and have fun.

Unfortunately, Man is a tribal beast, and appears to want to only socialise with “his own kind”, to the exclusion of anyone who doesn’t fit that particular emotional/psychological/sexual template. Pack instinct, it still rules.

As a final point, I’d just like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, not because of their orientation, but because of their talent and enjoyment of the music they were performing. At the end of the day, that’s what matters, not what they do, or what they are – so long as they’re singers and performers (in this context) that is the be-all and end-all.

Day Out

Well, this weekend I’m in Reading. Lucky me. Actually, its been nice so far – spent most of the morning in Sulham Woods (no decent links, but I’ve got shedloads of photos, so they’ll be online after the weekend), among the bluebells and so on. Very pleasant.

And tonight we went out for the debut public performance of the Reading Gay Chorus – who, for a debut performance, were simply stunning. Not a bad day at all…