About time too

There’s a piece in today’s Guardian about the financial services industry finally getting new guidelines on dealing with HIV and the like. Well done, it’s only taken fifteen years.

Personally, I despise the financial services industry in general. It’s one of the most amazingly bigoted industries, and one where anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into their little pigeonholes is instantly penalised. This is an industry that thinks it’s reasonable to do things like this (and I quote from the article)

There is evidence that some insurance companies are still using information about occupation to deny gay men cover. There have been cases where companies have demanded an HIV test because the applicant is a ballet dancer, hairdresser or an airline cabin crew member.

What absolute motherfuckers. There’s no other word for it – it’s an industry where the massive majority are just bean-counting cunts. The sooner these new guidelines come in, the better.

Tosser

Sometimes it’s odd to see a news story. This one involves a lad I went to school with – and it’s no real surprise to see that he’s as much of a cock now as he was fifteen years ago. I’m fairly sure that I also knew his passenger – one of those cases where the name rings a bell, but there’s no hard and fast recall behind it.

I find more and more that I emulate my father’s thoughts when it comes to drink-drivers and the like – I’ve no problem with them drinking, driving, crashing, and killing themselves. It’s when they take other people with them that it pisses me off. Die if you want, don’t force others to do the same.

Tweet Tweet Chirp Flutter

In one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a while, that barmpot Galligan over at Kitchentable describes the events surrounding ticking off one of his “things to do before I’m 40” list. In a big-brother style, including cut-aways and those irritating “don’t sue us” breaks in continuity/sound.

Well worth the read.

British Gas

Yet again, I had to deal last night with British Gas’s awesomely inept customer services department. The following is the letter of complaint that’s being posted off today.

Dear Customer Services Manager

I have today had the dubious joy of dealing with the Customer Services department of British Gas, which has left me fuming on several matters.

However, I believe that the most glaring problem with the entire call was at the start, where I was asked to validate my account in accordance with Data Protection Act requirements. Having explained to the customer services advisor that I had a letter from yourselves in front of me, I was asked to provide – for DPA – my name, address, and postcode.

Apparently, this is enough to “prove” my identity, and is in line with British Gas’s DPA policy as being ample proof. Obviously it is not – as I explained to the advisor, I could have been absolutely anyone with access to the letter. ALL the information requested was in the top third of the sheet of paper.

As such, I find this state of affairs to be utterly disgraceful, and I hope that you will feel much the same.

In line with the requirements of the Information Commissioner, I am initially taking this matter up with British Gas. However, in light of both the seriousness of the potential breaches, and also the exceptionally dispassionate “that’s the way it is” attitude of the customer services personnel involved, if I have not had a response from yourselves by 21^st July 2004, I shall request that the Information Commissioner’s Office become involved in this matter.

Yours Sincerely Blah, Blah, Blah

I can’t wait to see the response to that one…

Mastermind

Well, Mastermind (bizarrely, the BBC doesn’t have a link or minisite for it) started again on TV last night, and as promised at the time, it was the one we saw being recorded back in March. It was interesting to see how it’d been cut together from the recording session, and even more interesting to see that I still knew keff all about any of the specialist subjects…

Fanaticism.

My God, I’m glad I’ve got a DVD player. Not content with fucking Euro 2004, we’ve now got keffing Wimbledon too, along with the standard *spit* Henmania too. Oh joy, oh happiness, oh be still my happy heart.

And once that’s over, it won’t be long ’til Athens Olympics. Oh, and also in there will be the British Grand Prix on the 11th July – and I’m sure there are a couple of other events I’ve forgotten/ failed to care about/ erased from memory.

Solstice

Ye Gods, what a weekend. All’s well, but it’s been pretty manic.

In other news, today is the longest day (Oh piss, linked to the wrong thing – it should be this one. Told you it’d been one of those weekends.) today is the longest day and a bunch of hippies, druids and travellers saw it in at Stonehenge. Good for them.

So – the longest day already? They just get shorter from here in, until Winter appears in all its glory once more. Must make a note to put in the daylight bulbs this week, make sure that happens in good time. Joy.

Domesticity

No updates today – and possibly tomorrow – as major changes ae going on here chez Lyle. I’ve now got a friend sharing the house with me, as her marriage has travelled up crap creek without a paddle to redeem itself.

So for the forseeable future, the house doesn’t have just me in it. It’s an interesting development (one of many) over the last couple of weeks, and will take some time and energy in order for me to figure out what the chuff’s going on.

So bear with me, and if weekends are quiet, you’ll have to live with it for the moment. It’s all going to calm down soon, I promise. Well, “soon” in the geological context, anyway. *grin*

Not Waving

One thing I’ve been glad to see today is that a new legislation will, for the first time in the UK, allow for ‘living wills’. I’ve always liked this kind of thing, along with the American “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate) document. I would hate to be in a position where someone could decide what should happen to me, and to have no valid form of input into that decision.

‘Living Wills’ aren’t a comprehensive answer – but at least they open the door for such a thing.

Headspace

Do you ever have periods where your head is utterly full, and there’s really not much room – if any at all – for other stuff? Well, that’s been this week for me.

I’m sure I’ll write a load about various things in the end, but for now there’s a process going on of trying to get it all to make sense first. Doomed to failure, of course, but there we go.

So anyway, there’s chuff all happening here – however, Emily is looking for tales of casual sex (to add to her book, rather than random pervery) so go on, have some fun over there.

Inertia

Well, last night I ended up sleeping at something like 3am, and up at 7.30. Yet I feel better than when I’ve been going to bed at midnight. There’s no logic to this, and it’s doing my head in.

And in other news I still feel like shite, healthwise. Thank Christ it’s Friday, and the weekend looms.

However, today may be slow on the updates – there’s a distinct air of lethargy about the place. Hope you don’t mind.

Men

Why is it that so many men are such complete knob-heads?

A friend of mine came over this evening to see La Mala Educacion (“Bad Education”) by Pedro Almodovar. Her boyfriend knew where we were, yet when she came out of the cinema, there were no less than six missed calls from him.

After that, having called back, and despite telling him she was going to be driving, the numbnuts cockknocker called back another four times. Absolutely bizarre – I swear I don’t understand how people think that this kind of behaviour is either a) sane, b) attractive, and c) likely to keep the relationship going.

I despair.

Camel – Horse Designed By Committee

According to a new study, committees are stressful, boring, and unproductive. I’m amazed it’s taken this long for anyone to figure it out, really – obviously the people doing the study had never worked for a local authority, or any form of Government.

Improving The Day

Considering the last post though, today is actually rating as a Bloody Good Day^® so far. Only a couple of weeks ago, I observed (not here, but to the parents) that one of my favourite bands, the Cowboy Junkies, hadn’t toured in ages. Then I saw an ad in NME that said they were playing one gig. In London. The next day. Arse-nuggets.

Anyway, I had a look around today, and they’re doing a UK tour, including playing a gig in Manchester in October. Tickets have already been purchased, and I’m looking forward to it. Fan-bloody-tastic!

Drained

God, I wish I knew what was going on with my sleep cycle. I’m utterly shattered – and not feeling particularly well, but that’s not something I’ll bother people with. Anyway, due to feeling rougher than a badger’s arse, I’ve actually been going to bed early – around midnight-ish. Yet still I feel shattered, and actually feel worse than when I go to bed at the normal time, of between two and three.

As it is, the option of just collapsing and dying really quite appeals at the moment. I wonder if it’s not a reaction from my body of “Ooooh, I remember this sleep thing – I want some more, so I’m going to chuff you up ’til you get some.”

Thank God that this coming weekend is one where I don’t have much planned. Well, except for a friend moving in for an undetermined period while she sorts her life out. That won’t be stressful or chaotic, oh no.

Geeky : 2

For once, a geeky question about CSS. (Yes, I know *Yawn*) I’m trying to get a site design that uses a graphic background, then the content appears over the background, but with a degree of transparency.

What I mean by this is that I want the background image to appear, even when the content is there, rather than the content section being a plain opaque colour. I’m sure it’s a CSS command of something like opacity:0.9 – but I can’t find it. Any advice will be gratefully received.

Ooops

Excellent – I hadn’t seen this before, but it appears that there is a major problem (well, other than armed people on planes) with the concept of Sky Marshals.

The problem? They stick out like a sore thumb in a crowd of passengers. What a complete stroke of genius.

Geeky : 1

I know that other people have mentioned it already, but Mozilla has now released Firefox 0.9 for download. A bit more stable, a bit quicker, a slightly different appearance. Oh, and it keeps the settings from 0.8, although you do have to get the extensions again, which is a bit of a pain.

I’ve got it, and I like it.

Extension

Work-related post, for once. Don’t fall over, you at the back.

Yes, my contract has been extended again. I’m now here ’til at least the start of October. *Sob*

This contract was initially a six-monther, purely a project to install and develop a content management system for the council’s internet and intranet sites. That was thirteen months ago, and they’re only just getting ready to sign the contract with the supplier they’ve chosen. The wheels of this bureaucracy move so slowly that if you didn’t pay attention you’d think it was actually standing still.

As it is, things may still change. I saw a *gasp* permanent position I quite liked the look of, and sent off for an application package yesterday. We’ll see what comes of it.

For now though, the outlook is that I’m in Oldham ’til close to my birthday. Lucky me.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Yes, it took me some time to get to see this. There were a variety of reasons, but mainly it came down to first “can’t be arsed” combined with “not during half-term”, and then became “Ah well, I’ll see it on the weekend”.

So – what did I think of it? In general, I liked it – I’m glad that the new director managed to go with the darker feel of the book, following on from the more child-friendly and glossy first two. Managing to move Chris Columbus on to producer duties was probably a Very Good Thing for the HP franchise.

There are still faults within the production though – certain shots and cuts are over-used, and begin to feel tired by the end of the film. Also, there are some minor, but bloody annoying – bugs, such as Harry Potter’s scar moving during scenes (and even disappearing at one point), beds reassembling themselves, and the “Hulk Hypothesis” where a character can revert to human fully clothed, but when they transform again, the clothing stays behind.

Obviously it’s not possible to translate the film word-for-word from book to big screen, but there do seem to be a couple of huge sections missing. Particularly the explanation about who Prongs, Padfoot, Moony and Wormtail are – which is fairly relevant in the long run – as well as any explanation of the form Harry’s Patronus takes. Various other sections have been dropped too, but that seems to be the real biggie. It’s enough to make me wonder if those parts might not be explained in a “Special Edition” DVD release with extended footage.

But they’re the negative aspects. In general, the film is still pretty superb, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even with the stroppy little cunt darling child kicking the back of my seat for the first half hour. The main characters are still excellent, and Michael Gambon replaces Richard Harris as Dumbledore very nicely. It’s also interesting to see how Emma Watson (Hermione) is growing into the role, but certain scenes also make me wonder if she’s not going to be the next Keira Knightley, which could make for some entertaining films over the next few years.

Overall, an enjoyable two and a half hours of entertainment. I do wonder though how Goblet of Fire will fare – and how long it’ll be. There’s an awful lot of book to fit in there, and a lot less that’s skippable…

Boots

Yes, Pix, I’ve sent it over to the Shoe Project too, but in the name of completeness, a side-by-side of the new boots and old.

It doesn’t really take a rocket-scientist to work out which pair is which, does it? I think that the photo should perhaps have really been captioned “Well fucked”.

A Rare World-Cup Post

England Lost. What a shocker. At some point I’ll remember to care.

However, watching the news last night I was struck by one thing. The Home Secretary was over in Portugal. To watch the match. (bottom paragraph)

David Blunkett. Watching the match? Some mistake, surely.

Homecoming

Well, I’m back, after a weekend of idiocy and weddings. Oh, and Harry Potter 3. (Of which more in a bit) Well, someone had to.

In the meantime, I’m also guesting over at Uborka this week (again), and today contains a small post about How to Swear. There’ll be more, but right now I’m at work and I’ve forgotten my log-on and password. It’s one of those days.

Wedding

No, not me, you fools. But this weekend I’m going to be attending a wedding. God only knows why – I’m the +1 on a friend’s invite. It should be fun actually – several of those attending were people I went to school with, or who were in the years close to mine. So it might be fun. Of course, it also might just be hell on earth. But if that’s the case at least it’ll be hell with vodka.

Anyway, updates may be a bit thin on the ground for the weekend, depending on access etc. We’ll see. Have a good weekend though!

None So Blind

So, David Blunkett is ‘mortified’ at the results of yesterdays elections, is he? If so, he’s the only person in the UK. No-one else was surprised at all that Labour lost a shedload of places, and ended up coming third.

David Blunkett … blamed the Iraq war for “damaging” the Labour vote.

© BBC News

Fair enough, I’m sure Iraq’s got something to do with it. But laying it all at the door of that is frankly just fucking blinkered. People are getting uneasy about Blunkett and Blair’s policies about ID cards, a whole variety of strikes and pay disputes, and slowly realising that he’s just another PR-friendly weasel. Still, it’ll be interesting to see whether they actually change anything, or just keep on ramrodding in policies that people don’t like.

Made For Walking

Yay, and indeed, Woo. I’m now the posessor of a new pair of Cat boots, following on from last weekend’s sea-walk with the old ones.

I haven’t yet brought myself to bin the old ones, so I may still take a photo of their impressive greyness – and thank the good lord that you don’t have smell-o-net. I don’t know why I haven’t yet chucked ’em out, other than that I’d probably be accused of dumping poisonous waste – or perhaps get a visit from GMP alleging I’m some kind of terrorist with access to chemical weapons. Leave the boots on a train, the carriage would be cleared in no time flat.

Still, the new ones are much the same as the old – I hope I get 3+ years use out of these!

The Criminal Mind

Caution : Genius at work

Offensive Office

via Razorhead.

The BBC has a piece about politeness in the office and its effects on colleagues, following a survey by Office Angels.

Office Angels is urging people to turn up for meetings on time, turn mobile phones off and cut down on swearing.

Now, for me that counts as pretty much “No shit, sherlock”. Readers of d4d™ would be amazed to know that it’s exceptionally rare for me to swear in a meeting. (although the muttering afterwards while walking back to my office would make sailors blush) In my experience telling someone that they’re a fuckhead twadgeknacker with about as much practical business knowledge as an impotent in a whorehouse is utterly unproductive – no matter how much I might want to say it. (If I’m honest, I sometimes think that my tone conveys these words without them needing to be said aloud. The subvocal “You tosser” seems to just tag itself on to a sentence.)

As for Razorhead’s own example of someone taking calls in the middle of a meeting, I think that might make me swear. All mobiles have a “Silent” option – most now have a vibrate option. At worst, turn the poxy fadnadging thing off. Yes, *Gasp* it has an off switch. You don’t have to take every call at any time, no matter how important you may wish to look. Instead, you’re making yourself look like a smug egocentric huffswanger. (Don’t ask)

So – that’s the basics of being better in the office, is it? Personally, to that little lot I’d add…

• Not smelling like a dead otter with the squits
• Actually doing the work, instead of swanning around complaining how busy you are while doing fuck all
• Not talking about fucking bastard Euro 2004 incessantly and at a volume where everyone in the office is forced to listen
• Ditto, but for Eastenders, Corrie, and most other soaps/dramas/whatever

and

• Scratching your nuts/fanny/groin area while talking to colleagues

Thank you for listening.

Security

Yesterday evening was an utter bastard. I have a range of sites hosted by 34sp now, as they seem to be good, stable, secure, and provide decent value for money. However, last night the security was a problem…

Being an utter twadge of the first order, when I’ve signed up for domains and hosting with them, I’ve used an email address and password combination. However, a)I normally forget which one I wanted as my “main” email/password, so I come up with something else. And then get really creative and use a password that isn’t one of my regular ones (I have about six that I use everywhere in most places, so I can normally remember them) just to confuse things further.

Last night I was trying to update one site (Domain One), and it kept coming up with the file system from another of my sites (Domain Two). Fair enough, they’re on the same admin login, but the domain names are very different. So I email 34sp to ask them what the blazing badgery knackers is going on. They say “you need to validate your enquiry against your log-on and password for this account” (which is, of course, different to the FTP login) Can I remember it? Can I arseburgers.


Another email – “Um, can you send the login details to the registered email address, because I’m a twadge and can’t remember what it is” and following the “authorise this request through the login and password you can’t remember” response (and it’s rather ruder reply from myself) I got logged in.

It’s not in that account. Domain One is – the one I thought had the problem – but Domain Two is on a completely different account. It just happens to sit on the same server as Domain One. Aaaaaaaargh!

At this point my brain is bleeding out through my ears, but logic has kicked in and said “Hold on a minute, this is their fuckup, not yours!” so I’ve asked them to find out what the hacknacking chuff the problem really is. I’m still waiting for a response…

Going Postal

Yes, it’s taken some time, but I’m going to blether about tomorrow’s elections. Be afraid – but don’t be too afraid, because it’s not a sweary post.

Here in the North-West, they’ve been trialling postal voting – and in many ways it’s been a complete balls-up. It was brought in too close to the polling day, and as such there simply wasn’t enough time to make sure that it was implemented correctly and smoothly. Ballot papers were misprinted, or had errors in, and then had to be reprinted, checked, and distributed (or in some cases re-distributed) all to a strict deadline. So in that aspect it’s not gone down well at all. Cynics (Yes, Ian Hislop, I mean you) have observed that all the areas that are trialling the postal vote are primarily Labour areas, and that they’re trying to get as many votes in as possible – which is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure I’m that politically cynical.

Personally, I have problems with a couple of other aspects of the postal vote. First, the “confirmation” by another person that a voter is who they say they are. This is something that’s easily forgeable – I’ve no idea how they’ll be validating that the people who have countersigned actually exist, but I can’t see that it’ll be comprehensive. And if that’s the case, then there’s a flaw in the voting procedure. Secondly, there are barcodes on each ballot paper. Voting is meant to be anonymous, yet (and maybe I’m paranoid) each ballot has a unique bar-code on it, both on the envelope and on the ballot paper. Somewhere along the line, that means it’s likely that there is some form of database holding barcode against address/voter – which means that, given any interest at all, it’s possible to figure out who’s voted for who, and that doesn’t just flaw the voting procedure, it runs the risk of breaking it totally.

I can understand that there needs to be some method of increasing voter turnout. I make the effort even when it’s turning up to a voting booth, but a lot of people don’t. In the age of instant gratification, where everything can be available at the flick of a switch or the press of a button, it’s an effort to get to a voting station. The postal voting method has already apparently increased the turnout, so it’s been a success in that context.

But what does the future hold? Will we end up “pressing red” on the TV remote control in order to vote? Or “Send a Text saying ‘Vote:[whoever]’ to 98444”? Both of these methods would require some form of validation, a proof that you had voted once and once only – the easiest way is to have that unique ID, that voter code, and unless the code is there (and only used once) then it’s a spoiled ballot. But the unique ID means that the voting is no longer anonymous, and can thus be tracked, and (for example) Opposition voters targeted by the current government in order to change their minds for the next election. It seems that it’s a double-edged sword, we either have voter anonymity, or we go for increased voter turnout.

The only way to do both is to make it that each person HAS to vote. It becomes a legal – and enforceable – requirement, the way Australia already does it. But then there has to be a change to the ballot papers – if we have to vote, there has to be an option to say “None of the Above”, a statement that while you have to vote, you don’t have to like any of the fuckers you’re voting for. I suspect that “none of the above” would be the recipient of a high proportion of the vote…

Up It

Yes, Haloscan’s up it again. With luck it’ll get fixed soon.

In the meantime, if anyone does have comments on any of the stuff I’ve posted today, they can email it to me. Then once Haloscan has it’s database unborked, I’ll add them into the system.

It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.

Sea Boots

Oh, Nads. I’ve got to attend a wedding this weekend, and so of course smart clothing is an essential. (People who know me are now already pissing themselves with laughter at that concept) “Suited and booted” is the expression we’re looking for.

Boots however, are now a problem. Having been to Middlesbrough last weekend, I went off to Redcar with friends for a walk on the beach. Beaches and sea are still the main things I miss since moving to Manchester, having previously spent two years living in Weymouth. That’s when I got used to a two-minute walk to the beach, and the constant sound of sea. I love it. But anyway, I digress. Redcar.

Much as I think the place itself is a pretty standard seaside dump (cf. Weymouth, Great Yarmouth, Blackpool, ad infinitum, ad nauseam) it’s got a pretty good beach – so long as you can ignore the steelworks at one end of it (which most of the photos somehow seem to miss out). So we were wandering along it, at the sea’s edge, and the tide was coming in.

Yes, you’ve guessed it – boots, covered in sea-water. At which point I gave up caring anyway, so they just got soaked in the end. I’d forgotten about the wedding.

The boots are now grey in places, salt-water having dried into the leather. That is (perhaps) sortable. The real problem is that, having been wet, they now smell. Badly. I mean really really badly. I’ve had three years use out of them, and they were on the way out anyway, but I’ve now got to buy new boots before the weekend.

Oh, bollocks.

From Shitehawks to Nighthawks

You know, some people would say I was a geek. (I know, it’s hard to believe) Perhaps I am – it’s hard to come up with another reason why I feel that Peregrine falcons breeding in London would be a pretty good reason for a visit to the capital. (I’m going to be down that way at the start of July anyway, visiting Tate Modern to see the Hopper exhibition with my father – so I suspect that a small side-trip to Regents Park may be in order)

Of course, I also think that Ospreys in the Lake District are a good thing too, although for now I stick with occasionally looking at the webcam.

Concert Hotel

I was going to blither about this yesterday, the noticed that Gert had mentioned it too, and then completely forgot. Typical.

Yesterday, the new Radisson hotel in Manchester offically opened. Normally a new hotel wouldn’t have been overly news-worthy, but this one has been built to use the frontage of the Free Trade Hall.

The entire project has been a fascinating development, taking the listed frontage of the Free Trade Hall, (built in 1856) and then trying to build something modern that still works against it. Various suites have been named after musicians and conductors that have played at the venue, which I feel also adds a nice touch to the entire concept.

The Hall has been a shell since I moved up here, and it’s good to see the building with some life in it again. I’ll probably get some photos of the development in the next few days, and bung them on d4d™ when I do.

Glowing

“Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.”
My boss hums.

By chuff it’s warm. The office here was designed for Scott of the Antarctic a time before Global Warming had come into the lexicon. So it’s got one whole wall of glass, pointing directly into the sun. With no air-conditioning, and double-glazed windows. Calcutta would be proud of this particular black hole.

Of course, the thing that really tops it off is that it’s warm, and so Stinky™ is sweating like a polar bear in a solarium. Skunk is apparently the perfume of the day. Luckily, I have a fan, so some of it is being blown in other directions, rather than just coagulating into a festering miasma of hum.

Don’t you all just wish you were me?

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

In today’s Media Guardian, Roy Hattersley writes a very good piece on perceptions about homosexuality using the current scenarios on Coronation Street. I can’t say overly much, as I’d rather put cocktails sticks in my eyeballs than watch Corrie, but I can’t find much wrong with the piece either.

Soaps in general love to promote stereotypes (while continuing to have one fucking huge paradox within them anyway^*) and anything that’ll reflect and reinforce the probable stereotypes of the viewing audience. With the big two in particular, it seems that reality, and positive role models are really the purview of Serious Drama, rather than Popular Entertainment. (I hope you can hear the cynicism going into the pronunciation of Popular there) So it’s “OK” to propagate the same things, without too much hope of reality or diversification entering into the mix.

^* The paradox at the centre of soaps is that while they purportedly portray “real life”™, no-one ever comments about anything happening in the other soap.

“In the four weeks to May 11, EastEnders averaged 11.7 million viewers and a 55% audience share on Tuesdays.”

“The three episodes of Coronation Street that featured Todd’s revelations to his pregnant fiancee Sarah Louise Platt averaged 12.2 million at 7.30pm, 12.2 million at 8.30pm and 11.5 million at 10pm – an average audience share across the three instalments of 54%.”

both quotes ©Guardian Newspapers

So 12million viewers each, and yet not one of them lives on Coronation Street or in Albert Square. What’re the odds? It wouldn’t take much for that kind of reality, just the odd conversation about “Did you see what happened in {name of other soap} last night?” But no, they’ll never do it. And that’s the Soap Paradox.

Envy

There are times where I really hate WVS. A perfect example is the photo he posted yesterday. All of a sudden I don’t feel like posting up my own stuff any more… (I will, but – well – *sigh*)

Common Sense…

is obviously something I lack. Having been blah and tired all day, a three hour train-ride home seemed to perk me up. (And Oh, I do like having a laptop that can manage two journeys like that without a recharge in between, and still have 40% battery life by the end of it</smug>) So of course, with work looming in the morning, and being knackered for most of the day, finally going to bed at 2am was probably something of a Very Bad Idea^®. One day I’ll learn.

Anyway, I’ve got a CD of the photos from the concert with me, so during my time *cough* “working hard” today I’ll probably get the chance to knock up a photo page. More news as and when.

Braindead

Blah. A quiet day – no hangover,but a definite feeling of letheragy. Not going to get back home til late tonight, so photos from Friday’s concert won’t be online ’til Monday. Sorry and all that,but them’s the perils of drink…

Ticketmaster

Oh, and amazingly the duplicate tickets were at the box office, and there was no hassle with anything aboutit. My cynicism was, for once, wrong. You’ve no idea how much that actually pleased me. And, by extension, saved me about £100

Firefox vs. Blogger

Hmmm, that was interesting. The post below originally appeared as being written yesterday, which wasn’t true. As such it’s been deleted and re-posted, but I wondered why it’d happened in the first place. And I think the answer was as follows :-

I use Firefox to write most of the stuff in Blogger. It works, I like it. One of the features of Firefox is that when you close it down, it saves all the window settings, including the tabs you had open at the time. On this occasion, one of the open tabs was Blogger’s “Create Post” – so when I re-opened Firefox this morning, it went to the old “open” create tab.

Blogger now doesn’t date posts according to when they were actually posted/completed/published. Instead it does it according to when the create page was opened. It’s as good a way as any, I suppose – but it doesn’t take account of norks like me using a create page that actually opened yesterday…

Halle-keffing-lujah

Over the last week, a wide variety of swearwords have been emanating from the corner desk at which I work. I got lumbered with assigned to do a website for part of the local authority. All well and good so far.

Except the fudgeknacking twunts had already “done” their pox-gonaded site with a *cough* webdesigner outside the authority. Oh dear Christ on an underpowered moped, had they.

I use the term “webdesigner” in it’s loosest possible term. We’re talking about terms so loose that they would describe Hitler as “slightly aggressive, not overly fond of foreigners”, or Big Brother as “entertaining TV”. This ringlicking mutant sub-normal reject from the Cambridge monkey labs didn’t use anything as standard as Dreamstuffweaver, oh no. The scrofulous fucknugget instead chose … M$ Publisher. Yes, Publisher. And then “Save as HTML”.

I’ve spent a week making the code even approach readable. Just under 80 – yes, you read that correctly – eighty scumsucking pages of M$’s attempts to write HTML. It’s no frigging wonder their browser’s a sack of maggot-ridden donkey-shite, when you see the kind of abuse they give HTML. Dreamweaver fell over just trying to render the bloody code, let alone edit the twadgeing thing.

I hope I never find out which headshaved knuckle-dragging wingnut actually wrote this abortion, and I think they should hope I never do either. I’d imagine that a keyboard would make for some interesting proctological contortions. Particularly if I sharpened the bugger first.

Taking the Piss

Fucking hell, for a festival that used to be commitedly uncommercial, Pride sure has changed. Of course, it’s not called Pride anymore, this year it’s the Big Gay Out, (shit name too – surely something better could’ve been thought up?) sponsored by Faceparty (who last time I looked were busy getting a bollocking for having photos of under-16s in various levels of undress) and with tickets on sale through your corporate friends and mine, Ticketmaster.

It used to be free, then it was (if memory serves) £5, then it was £pound;15 last time I looked. Now it’s £25. Inflation? Not quite. More like just a rip-off. And of course there’ll likely be less people going, so to “break even” next year they’ll up the prices even more. The economic model that doesn’t allow for “make it cheaper and more people will turn up”.

It’s not so much Pride, more Wallet.

Domain

Richard has realised he owns ten domain names, three of which are actually live. This made me think (in lieu of anything better to do while at work) about the ones I’ve got, as opposed to the ones I maintain for other companies.

There’s one that’s a middle ground – it’s my company, so it’s a site I own, but obviously I also maintain it. I won’t link to the various domains etc., because I do try to keep things seperate for a variety of reasons. As most people have figured, Lyle is a pseudonym, a nom-de-sweary, and adds a layer of remove to most of what I do. That’s the way I like to do d4d™, and it also means that my name doesn’t come anywhere near d4d™ should someone do a google search.

Anyway, the grand total is that I’ve currently got three live personal sites (including the company one) plus the one I was saying about the other day, which is in a kind of half-way house. There are also two three (oops, knew I’d forgotten one) that haven’t got anything done yet, and one I’m still thinking about buying.

In addition, there are four live sites that I’m still the main registrant and maintainer on, and three that are currently under development, as well as one that I haven’t yet bought (although I know the domain I want, just haven’t got round to it yet) and two that were bought purely on spec.

I think I need to get out more…

But anyway – how many domains have you got?

Abdication

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am not worthy. Anna has written a post that has meant I have now handed over the Sweary Crown, and currently admit defeat.

All hail Queen Anna, Her Profane Majesty.

Bizarre

Apparently, I’m #1 in google for the phrase “I want to redesign existing trouser“. I have no idea why, nor even why anyone would search on this phrase. But there we go.

About Bloody Time

Some people who email me will know that I’ve got a domain name which currently doesn’t have a web-presence. Well, OK, it’s got a holding page – but that’s it. I’ve had the domain for four years now – if not five – and have had some ideas of what to do with it, but nothing’s ever come to fruition.

So this may be another of those plans – only time will tell – but I think I’ve got an idea of what I’m going to use the domain for. It might even make for some interesting projects along the way. But for now I do feel some vague optimism, and a desire to see if I can make it work properly.

I’m not trying to be purposely enigmatic on this one (although it looks like I’m succeeding anyway) but for now I don’t want to curse the idea with too many expectations. But once it’s life, or on the way to working, I’ll publicise more about it.

Like an Arrow

Eh? You what? June? Already? When did that happen?

BB5 AKA “Load of old shite”

Oh Jesus Christ, God help us all, it’s back. For a fifth series, as if we weren’t all utterly fucked off with it after the first four.

Of course, most people weren’t bored comatose by the constant media drivel of the previous four, and already it’s one of the main conversation pieces of the office. I don’t even know who the people are – there’s someone called Kitten, apparently, and some ringpiece turned up in a thong? The mind boggles, and already my survival instinct has cut off any nascent desire to know any more about it.

Eight and a half weeks to go…

Mating Season

No, not me, you fools. However, thanks to David for sending me a series of photos and captions regarding – the mind boggles – Moose courtship.

And as an additional, the fantastic Mooseworld. I wonder if there’s a chance that 21 Piccadilly can become an associate member?

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

snarlgruntsnurfhurgleHaloscanflurgschnifftwadgeknackerComments

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…

Getting away with it

Ah, another case of Do as I say, not as I do – Manchester Police’s Assistant Chief Constable (the one in charge of traffic, no less) gets stopped for doing 104mph on a motorway, and gets away with 6 points and a £450 fine. Alright for some, isn’t it?

Chris Rea
Manchester Apollo

Some people just get confused. As we were leaving the gig, someone behind me said

“Why didn’t he play ‘Lady in Red’ ?”

Sorry, pet, wrong Chris.

However, if you knew what you were looking for, this gig was bloody good. Bizarrely, it was my second all-seated gig within 10 days, after donkey’s years without one at all.

A few years ago, Rea was diagnosed with cancer, and allegedly “did a deal with God”, and decided that if he survived, he’d play the music he wanted to, and do blues albums instead of some of the pap he’d done previously. The first two thirds of the gig was exactly that – proper “old-fashioned” blues, like a supercharged bar-room band. Seriously good blues and rock’n’roll type music.

The last third was more a revue of his older stuff, “Let’s Dance”, “Road to Hell”, “Josephine”, and the like, but even then they’d been bluesed-up (if that’s a word) and a lot better than they’d been remembered.

All things considered, a bloody good gig – much enjoyed. And thank fuck, no “Lady In Red”.

Classy Google Searches

From the last twenty-four hours:

Niagara Academy livejournal. No idea, sorry.
“My boss is a twat” t-shirts – Nice idea! Definitely has potential…
Machine’s plastic and injection part – the mind boggles.

Be Still, My Bleeding Heart

Following on from yesterday’s pithy review by the Guardian of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, they now have a feature about the aftermath of the show. It makes for some hilarious reading.

“I think they manipulated the town, the restaurant and people who work so hard to earn a living,” said Sarah, a waitress. “They portrayed Silsden as an unsophisticated northern town in the name of reality television. We are as sophisticated as people in London. This is an affluent, growing place and I think we all feel insulted.”

What, a TV “reality” programme that alters viewers perceptions of what the place is like? Imagine my shock. It’s also worth noting that “Neither Gray nor the restaurant were paid by Channel 4 for their participation, which the head chef invited by answering an advert in a catering magazine.” – so really the chef thought he was good enough to be on TV, and didn’t think for a minute that he’d be upstaged and outdone by Ramsay. To me, that comes under “deserves everything he gets”.

Gray, who yearned to be a chef from childhood, said he did not undergo any psychological profiling before agreeing to take part in the programme, something Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychologist from Caledonian University said should have taken place.

“People want to take part because they’re excited about being on television. They see it as a path to stardom, but when they actually see the result it’s different. They think they have control and then realise they don’t.”

I’m sorry, but psychological profiling before the show? The lad wanted to be on TV, answered an ad to get him on TV, and is now upset that he was made to look like a twonk. He volunteered. If C4 had rung up the restaurant and said “we want to film at your place” without any prior enquiry from the people working there, then I’d feel more charitable about it. But they volunteered to be on the programme, answered an ad to take part, and didn’t even get paid for it, which leaves me thinking far more “reap what you sow”.

RIP

One of my old teachers, John Fulkes, has been found dead at his home (and they think he’d been dead for some time before anyone found him). The funeral is on Friday. RIP.

Disinterested

This one can be filed under “Brewery, Piss-up, Organise“.

Today, there’s been a report released about the future of Oldham, following on from the race riots in 2001, and detailing how Oldham can move on and improve itself. It’s been reported about by the Manchester Evening News – in fact, it’s front page headline, plus two further pages inside, plus an editorial comment. In the paper, it says “for a full copy of the document, look at the website”. On the website, the entire report isn’t even mentioned. [UPDATED : I’ve since been pointed to a copy of the story on the site, and the 5.5Mb PDF of the report is here]

Not only is it not mentioned on the MEN website, it’s not mentioned on the website of Oldham council, who are one of the parties behind the report. (Apparently they want to make it not look like a council-funded report – instead they make themselves look ignorant of what’s happening in their own town) At the time of writing, the UrbEd page has a link to a PDF of the report, only the PDF either hasn’t been uploaded to the webserver, or they’ve just keffed it up and sent up an empty document. The NorthWest Development Agency, another of the partner organisations, also doesn’t have any information about the report, except to detail the launch party for it, at Gallery Oldham, which also hasn’t got any information on the site.

And finally, the main organisation/site behind this report, Oldham Beyond at the time of writing hasn’t even mentioned the fucking report.

Organisation – don’t you just love it?

Hypocrites

Obviously the Anglican church still believes in “Love thy fellow man” – but don’t take it too literally. Not content with insisting that Dr Jeffrey John wasn’t “fit” to be the Bishop of Reading, a group of “around 40 clergy and laity” in the St Albans area now want him to step down as Dean of St Albans.

In a statement, the St Albans Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship said the move was a “serious error” of judgement.

The group said it was “aggrieved” that the Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Rev Christopher Herbert, had agreed to the appointment.

© BBC news

What is the problem with having a gay man in the clergy? I’m sorry, but I simply don’t see what the issue is with this, other than homophobia and bigotry on the part of the blinkered bastards who are complaining.

Perfection

This quote is entirely © today’s Guardian.

If Gordon Ramsay was reviewing his own show, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (Channel 4), it would probably go something like this:

I tell you what, I’m fucking gobsmacked. Ramsay swans in from fucking London to fucking Bonaparte’s in Silsden like he’s God’s fucking gift and says “fuck” or “fucking” every other word. He tells some poor kid chef he’s a limp dick and an embarrassment and that he’s going to ram the cabbage up his arse. He’s making out he’s like some fucking food missionary, saving bad chefs round the country and spreading the word of good food, when really all he’s doing is helping his own fucking TV show and his ego. Then he fucks off back to London. Twat.

But he’s not. I thought it was quite entertaining.

I didn’t know I was writing reviews for the Grauniad…

And the earlier part of the review, covering BBC’s “Cutting It” is pretty good and pithy too.

On the way to work

While travelling to work today, a woman got on the bus, and spotted her friend sat in the seat behind me.

“Oh hello, are you on this bus too?”

A Gold Award^® in Stating the Bloody Obvious.

WinZip

I’d just like to quickly say that I think WinZip is ace. I’ve just taken a 10Mb logfile from d4d™’s server, and compressed it to 500Kb. Not a bad rate of compression at all.

</geeky>

Belated

Blimey, Naked Blog was three on Saturday. I hope that he had jelly and ice-cream at the party…

Lunatic

via Insubstantial, I bring you…

Creation of 4 simultaneous 24 hour days, within a single rotation of Earth, empowers me above all 1-day gods and
educated stupid scientists. I will wager $10,000.00 on it.

Spectacularly barking.

Another U-turn

Ah, the joys of government u-turns. Back in November (and it was still being reported as such as recently as a month ago) “Goebels” Blunkett was syaing that national ID cards wouldn’t have to be permanently carried, and nor would it be compulsory to have one. Yesterday, it was revealed that anyone who refused to be registered for a national ID card could be liable to a fine of £2,500. Yup, that’s still sounding pretty voluntary…

High-Class

Getting home today I had a mere 485 “deleted” emails (thanks to my message rules) and 360 “Junk” emails (thanks to Spambayes) Not bad for 48 hours away. One of them did make me laugh though…

Le Mont are delighted to announce our new exciting spring menu
for more details take a look at our website
www.urbis.org.uk
For reservations call 0161 605 8282
Open for Lunch Monday to Friday 12.00-2.30pm
Open for Dinner Monday to Saturday 7.00pm-10.30pm
Unfortunately due to a technical problem with our system we are enable to enclose a copy of the spring menu. Should you wish to receive a copy of the new menu, please email us back and we will get one out to you at the earliest convenience
Additionally Le Mont will be holding a Gourmet evening in association with Bollinger Champagne on Thursday 10th June 2004. The evening will consist of a 5 course gourmet menu with accompanying champagne and wines for £95.00 per person.
Reservations are essential for this evening.

We look forward to welcoming you to Le Mot in the very near future.

Le Mont at Urbis
Catherdral Gardens
Manchester
M4 3BG

I’ve replied to the email, because I was annoyed by the stupid errors within it.

To whom it may concern,

In addition to the “technical difficulties” and being “enable” (I think you meant “unable”) to send out the menu your mail is advertising, I note that towards the bottom of the email, “Le Mont” is now spelled as “Le Mot”, and “Cathedral” has somehow managed to become the recipient of an extra “R”.

As I am sure you will agree, this is hardly a great way to advertise a supposedly superior restaurant…

Sincerely

Lyle

Pedantry can be fun…

Yesterday

A train journey to Middlesbrough, and then a “sod this, let’s go to sit by the sea at Redcar, and put the world to rights”. Not bad at all. However, seaside bingo is an experience not to be repeated (no offence, Peter) but there’s still little to beat fish and chips out of paper sat on a bench by the beach.

In other news, “broken” networks are now working fine. Life is – well, if not good, then at least looking up.

Now I just need to get caught up on my own stuff, and sort all that out. Fun, fun, fun.

Amazonian Weirdness

Diamond Geezer pointed this out to me, but apparently Amazon has d4d up for sale. News to me, but then, most things are. Check your site out too…

Worst?

In my misfortune, while typing these posts out, I’ve had VH1 on in the background. For some reason they’ve decided that today is a day to air their “The Worst Songs of the…” for the 80s and 90s. In a way it’s kind of interesting, because while I agree that the songs are abysmal – in the 90s one so far we’ve had joys like Steps’ “5-6-7-8”, Ace of Bass’ “The Sign”, Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack”, and currently 2Unlimited’s “No Lyrics Limits” – in some ways I have a problem with calling them “the worst”. After all, they’re all memorable, even if only for how bad they were. But I can remember each one, from the first bars – so while they’re bad, they’re “good” enough to still be stuck in the brain 10ish years later. Surely if they were “the worst”, no-one would recall them? The truly worst would’ve been in the charts for a week, and then been forgotten about…

Today

I’ve been spending some time planning out stuff for the next couple of weeks. I’m in Reading next weekend, and thought I’d best check out train times etc. as it’s a bank holiday weekend. You know, those ones where “hardly anyone uses trains” (© Railtrack/Network Rail) so they close down half the routes for maintenance work.

Getting down on the Friday is no problem – direct, Manchester to Reading, piece of piss. Coming back on the Monday though, is a cunt. I’ve got to go from Reading to London Paddington, then from Paddington to Euston, then from Euston to Manchester. Well, at least it doesn’t involve riding on a bus, for once. But all the same, what a pain in the arse.

I hereby predict that, come the August Bank Holiday weekend, the line will yet again be closed between Reading and London. Because of course with the Carling Weekend festival in Reading, they won’t be expecting roughly 100,000 extra people in the town. Not that it sold out in less than three weeks, or anything.

Yesterday

Yes, yesterday was glorious and sunny, so I spent most of it outside, either in the city centre, or back at the house and in the garden. I’m definitely solar-powered, and the heavy dose of sunlight was probably one of the smartest things I’ve done in ages. Today will be more of the same, albeit with some of it through a train window. Joy.

While I was out yesterday, I took several new photos of the city – still in my normal haunts, as I really wasn’t in the mood to do much wandering. I’ll see how they look, and they’ll possibly make their way on here at some point.

Sun

Bugger all this, I’m off out into the sun…

E-zimmer

Mike is reminiscing about home pages and newsgroups. Enjoy, unless you’ve no idea what I just said, in which case don’t bother.

Face Off

Well, it was talked about a month ago, but it’s now been confirmed that the current edition of “The Face” will be the last.

St. George

Well Hey Ho and a jolly tantivvy, it’s April 23rd, which of course means it’s St. George’s Day. Or, according to today’s Grauniad, it should be St George and Jonny day, with a good roast beef meal, cooked by mum, and followed by a pint in the pub.Some people have been given the day off. Alternatively, you could choose to remember that it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, and join those celebrations instead.

Or of course you could take a leaf out of Richard Desmond’s book, be utterly “patriotic” and abuse the Germans.

Useful?

Here at work I have a colleague. Amazing, I know. However, I have absolutely no idea what he does. He’s supposedly in the web-team, the same as myself and Stinky. He never attends the same meetings, is seemingly incapable of answering even the most elementary questions regarding website and intranet (instead they get passed on to me, written in a doctor-esque scrawl on green card) and doesn’t appear to edit or write any of the web pages.

He’s been in the programming teams, only they got rid of him because he’s (in someone else’s words) “a completely clueless twat” and he’s ended up on the web-team. (Some would say that’s the rightful place for clueless twats, but I wouldn’t be that harsh) All he seems to do is sit at his desk and count the hours/minutes ’til it’s time to go home.

So my question is this : “What the fuck does he DO all day? and Why do the council keep him on?”

Identity

Two items on the BBC news site this morning caught my attention – partly because they seem to be semi-related. First, according to a MORI poll, 80% of people would be happy to carry national ID cards. However, most of them (58% of those questioned) also think there would be problems implementing the card system, (as per usual, file under “No, Really?“) and only 20% would be happy paying the proposed £35 fee for such a card.

The second story is about Jim Lee, a man who doesn’t exist, according to the government. Never registered at his birth, with no NI (National Insurance, for non-UK readers) number, he’s never claimed benefit, and has never been in “the system”. Now he’s in a position where it’s quite possible he’ll be back on the streets because the DWP won’t accept him without proof of identity, either paper-based, or on the recommendation of family (who he hasn’t seen since the age of 14) or friends. (possible, but he’s moved around so much that there aren’t really any regular friends either)

Utterly farcical. And remind me, just how is someone like this supposed to get a National ID card, when he can’t even get an NI number?

Coining It

Did you know that the pound coin is now 21 years old? I didn’t. The Manchester Evening News today has an article about it, including the changing attitudes towards the coin since its introduction, and also a comparison of its buying power now to then. Interesting reading.

Orange

Out of interest, why do people of a certain age insist on dyeing their hair such bizarre colours? They just look ridiculous, trying to cleave to a self-image that clearly is no longer theirs, and probably never was.

I’m not talking about skater “kidz”, but instead those at the other end of the generational timeline. Today has been the day I witnessed an orange rinse talking to a blue rinse. And I really do mean blue. Not “silvery white” but blue. Although I’ve still only seen a green rinse once. Thankfully.

Five Years – Part 3 – Regeneration

I was interested to see in today’s Guardian that Grimethorpe is to get a new housing development. Grimethorpe was one of the Yorkshire mining villages that was virtually crippled by the miner’s strike, and never really recovered from it, particularly once the mine itself was closed down. In fact about the only surviving “industry” has been Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

My grandparents lived in Grimethorpe, and my grandfather was a miner at the pit. Personally, I loathed the place, even before the strike and closures. The last time I was there was five years ago (this seems to be a developing theme this week) for his funeral. At that time, my father said “that’s it. I’ll never come back here again” – he still hated it, even after 30 years away from it. I can’t say I blame him. (Oddly enough, I’ve just done a search for photos of Grimethorpe, and these two are actually taken from the same road my grandparents lived on, and probably within 5 houses of theirs.)

From as far back as I recall, Grimethorpe was a grey, polluted town, and that was after the Clean Air Acts and so on had already cleaned it up. Since the mine closed, it’s an area that has just gone further and further downhill, becoming the perfect definition of a depressed area. I hope that the Park Springs project and these housing developments bring some new life (and new money) into the place, but I know it’s not somewhere I’d choose to return to, let alone live in.

BBC2 @ 40

Finally reaching the joys of “middle age”, BBC2 is 40 today, and is celebrating, including a list of 40 of its best programmes. There’s also a small retrospective of BBC2 idents on the BBC site, and (via DG) a much bigger index.

In fact, DG’s post about the history of BBC2 is loaded with more links than I can provide, so go there, and read that instead.

Happy Birthday, BeebToo.

Five Years – Part 2

And another weirdness from the gig last night – bumping into an ex-colleague. He’d changed a lot, and so there was a good couple of minutes of “I know he’s familiar, but where the fuck from?” before it all clicked. We’d worked together for a company very soon after I’d moved up here, so again, we’re looking at about 5 years ago now. The company was a small ISP based in Manchester called GreatXscape – no link, because the domain has now been taken over by some dodgy porncam company thing.

Anyway, it was good to see him, and catch up on some of the people I’d worked with. It’s just a surprise sometimes, coming up against people you’ve worked with before, particularly when it’s so far from the old context in which I knew them.

Norah Jones
Manchester Apollo

Unlike Chris, I did manage to see the Norah Jones concert last night. Partly through luck (I’d seen an advert, and knew friends who wanted to see her too) and partly through opportunity (there was money in my account, and I could afford the £30 per ticket gouge price), so I managed to get the tickets. And pretty good tickets they turned out to be – 19 rows from the front (well, row “S” – I think that’s 19th row).

Despite the comments of others (“they’ll have needles in the chairs to keep you awake”) it turned out to be a pretty good concert.

In direct contrast to most of the gigs I go to, this one was all seated. Very sedate, easy-listening. In fact, it was almost like a huge living room, with it’s own singer and band. Well, it wouldn’t be my living room – the seating I’ve got is comfortable, and doesn’t make my arse numb. But that’s a small side point.

The gig itself pretty much fulfilled the meaning of the word “intimate” – or as intimate as the Apollo gets, anyway, with 2,500ish people in there. It was good – the lighting was dimmer than I’d have liked, but then, I’m used to blinding bright shows etc. The sound quality was pretty much spot-on, and the musicians were excellent too. All in all, it was a pretty good gig – although I’ll still admit to being surprised by her covering two of the huskiest voices in music, “Long Way Home” by Tom Waits, and “Ride On” by AC/DC, originally sung by Bon Scott. All things considered, a pretty good evening – but with only a 90 minute performance, was it really worth ?pound;30 plus booking fee etc.? I don’t think so, but most of the people coming out agreed it had been a brilliant concert, and would probably disagree with me about value for money.

Five Years

It was only while reading this story (via Gert) that I realised it’s now five years since David Copeland set off three bombs in London. For me, it was the last one, at the Admiral Duncan in Soho that will always be the one I recall most, as I’d been through Old Compton Street less than half an hour before the bomb went off. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s already half a decade ago – but obviously it is.

Inspiration?

Hmmm, today I’m trying vainly to look for some inspiration. And not really doing all that well at it. I’m doing three (probably) different design ideas for one site, as a demonstration of the versatility of the website/product I’m creating, as well as the uses of CSS and PHP.

But inspiration is lacking. We’re not talking rocket science really, just three different titlebar images, logos, colour-schemes, and page layouts. I’ve done two (pretty much) but the third is – well, problematic. I’m sure it’ll come to me in the end, but for now it’s absolutely annoying the tits off me. Ah well.

The thing is, I’m not a graphic artist. Thankfully, nor have I ever claimed to be. I can (usually) get Photoshop to do what I want, and the ideas eventually transfer over the brain/hand/Photoshop interface, but it’s not easy, and tends to drive me barmy. Still, it does mean that when I’ve come up with something that works, or got at least the ideas, then I’m a happy bunny. Until then, stress-head reigns supreme.

Home Again, Home Again

Back home. The weather in Nottingham was abysmal, and pissed it down all day. The weather in Leicester wasn’t much better. It’s been a good weekend – although most of the group seem to have developed a dollop of food poisoning, which is never good. Thankfully I haven’t had it, which is a bonus considering the two hour train journey.

The birthday surprise went well, with the DJ at Zanzibar in Leicester being utterly gobsmacked that a whole bunch of his friends could be so sneaky as to all congregate in Leicester and organise it without him knowing.

Mission successful. *grin*

Normality

Well, after the calm of last weekend, I’m back on the trail of being daft. Nottingham this weekend – not for anything hugely relevant, just social commitments. Back Sunday. Possibly photos, probably not, if I’m honest.

There’s a few things I should probably be commenting on, but for now my brain’s in Helen Keller mode, so no guarantees at all.

Upgrade

I don’t need a new laptop.
I don’t need a new laptop.
I don’t need a new laptop.

But look. It’s shiny, and black, and ultrathin, and cute, and $3,200, and .. and …

I don’t need a new laptop.
I don’t need a new laptop.
I don’t need a new laptop.

Scapegoat?

Both the Grauniad and the BBC are reporting today on the story that 200 people have been falsely recorded as being criminals by the Criminal Records Bureau. I’m not surprised – but for once, I don’t think it’s fair to lay this one entirely at the door of the CRB. From the BBC story

In some cases the names of those being vetted by the bureau were similar or identical to those of actual criminals.

In others, the criminals had given someone else’s personal details to the authorities to avoid a police record.

Now, OK, the first sentence there is pretty much down to the CRB, and the fact it should check more than just the names. In fact, it _does_ check more than just the names, so it’s really more attributable to staff selecting the first matching name, rather than checking properly. That’s a procedural error, and not particularly great.

However, the second sentence is far more relevant – criminals using someone else’s name when arrested/charged/whatever. That’s not down to the CRB – it’s the police forces with procedural errors. I’ve been arrested a couple of times over the years, and have never been asked for proof of my name – it would be all too easy to simply use someone else’s name. That’s a flaw within the police system – and it’s stupid, because it’s something that’s pretty easy to verify, short of someone having a full set of false ID. Even a simple check in a person’s wallet is likely to reveal what their name is – cashpoint cards, switch cards, work ID cards, if they don’t match the name you’ve given, then it’s definitely cause for suspicion.

In fact, the CRB seems to be becoming the scapegoat for things like this. Back in December, it was acknowledged that it was relying on information from other agencies, which isn’t always accurate, yet it still took the brunt of the blame for Ian Huntley passing his CRB check when again the blame was actually attributable to the police forces who hadn’t kept records on his arrests. If the records had been kept, it’s far more likely that the CRB would have picked up on it, and not allowed him the job in Soham.

Also, that “200 people in two months” is actually a pretty insignificant figure. The CRB has the capacity to deal with 50,000 Disclosure checks per week. 25 errors a week isn’t good – but it’s still only a quarter of one percent of the capacity. That’s an error rate I can live with – particularly considering that it’s run by Capita (or Crapita, as Private Eye calls them) who aren’t exactly renowned for the smooth running of their contracts. Even the CRB one is now £150million over budget, which is currently in the throes of being investigated.

National ID Cards

I’ve studiously avoided mentioning the UK National ID card scheme currently being proposed by Hitler and Goering Blair and Blunkett, mainly because I don’t currently feel the need to froth at the mouth. However, Bruce Schneier – a well known security consultant and cryptography specialist – has written a piece about ID Cards that pretty much sums up my feelings on it. I’ve been reading Schneier’s Cryptogram newsletter for about three years, and (as with the post three down) I don’t agree with all of his views, but I do find the majority of it interesting and thought-provoking.

Kitchen-geek

Now that‘s what I call a sink.

Want one.

Sneering

I may not agree with what you say.
But I shall fight to the death to defend your right to say it.

Note : This is very disjointed at the moment. I’ll edit it several times, I’m sure. I know what I want to say, I just haven’t figured the right words yet.

There seems to be a bit of a theme developing at the moment. Meg has gone off for a break, primarily because of the attentions of some fucktard comment-troll, and now Blue Witch is off for a break as well, following on from people thinking they know her, and feeling able to snipe behind her back on her opinions. Gordon wrote his views earlier this week, which I agree with too.

So far as I’m concerned, blogs, weblogs, and all that gubbins come under one heading – Personal Sites. The first word there is the important one. It’s personal. We all have different opinions, different thoughts, and differing ways of expressing them. If we all thought the same, weblogs and personal sites would never have taken off – at least half the joy of blogs etc is finding other people, appreciating their style of writing, seeing what they have to say about things. Sometimes they’re good for spotting things we’ve missed ourselves – more times than enough I’ve found myself looking at a site or a story I’d never normally read, purely because one of my regular reads has said “this is a really good/bad/whatever thing, and you should read it”. I probably wouldn’t have found half the sites on the blogroll if it weren’t for things like that. And that’s what this is all about. It’s personal views, and we either like them or we don’t.

In that context, a set of blogs is no different to a party, or a social gathering. It’s a load of different people expounding about different subjects in different ways. Sometimes we listen, and like what we hear. Other times we listen, and disagree. Sometimes we disagree so much that we walk away, leave that group, and find another one.

With blogs, however, there’s a slight difference. Instead of just walking away thinking “I don’t really agree with that”, some people seem to feel the need to dissect that, and to turn it into personal attacks. Fair enough, that’s free speech at work. But it cuts both ways – I’ve got the right to say what the fuck I want, in whatever way I want. And so have you. I try to let people have their say, and if it’s in a way I don’t like, then fair enough – it’s still their right to say it.

Free speech is such a double-edged sword. So many of us banter the concept about willy-nilly, but the perspective on free speech there is “I’ll say what I want, but you can’t criticise it”. That’s not free speech. I can’t remember who first used the quote at the top of this post – but it echoes my feelings on this subject completely.

Fare thee Well

This’ll mean absolutely nothing to anyone outside Manchester, so if you’re not interested, just move along, there’ll be something else here soon.

Over the last four years or so, I’ve been a regular reader of City Life (Warning, the site appears to utterly bork Opera), the Manchester equivalent of Time Out. Next week, they’re relaunching with (another) new design, so this week’s edition is a bit of a milestone. One feature I’ve read almost religiously every week has been Phil Griffin’s Archisnap, a small feature that each issue has looked at a certain building or development around Manchester. Very bobble-hatted on occasion, but always passionate about the development of both architecture and Manchester, it’s always been a good read, whether I’ve agreed with the author or not. A small archive of them is available from Cube gallery – I’d love to see a full web archive of them at some point.

Through Griffin’s column, I’ve learned about bits of the city that no-one would really notice without having them pointed out, and also about buildings I’ve noticed, but had no idea of the history behind them. The last Archisnap is in this week’s City Life. It’ll be sorely missed.

Referrers

I don’t normally list any of the referrers to this site (other than bizarre Google searches, of course), but I’m intrigued about what brought the Department of Elder Affairs, Tallahassee, United States scurrying to this site earlier today.

At first I wondered why there was a department dealing with Elder trees, but now I realise I’m wrong. All the same, I’d love to know what brought them here.

Bollocks to it

Ah, the joys of favicons. Having norked about a bit, and added in a line of code to the HTML, it now works in most browsers. Except IE, which is (of course) doing its own thing, and just being a pain in the arse. So sod it, I’m not going to mess about any more for now, and work on the theory “It’s there, it’s just not always visible in borked browsers“

And at least I didn’t delete my entire weblog along the way. *Grin*

Bureaucracy

Gah, I’ve decided that Companies House are the bureaucrats it’s OK to loathe. On occasion I check out my company details on their site – not for any good reason, but more to make sure that I’m not missing anything, as they’ve been known to be utterly incompetent cunts in the past. (See also : the links listed here. ) This time, it’s fortunate that I did check it – as yet again, the form for my Annual Return hasn’t been received here, yet it’s due in at the end of the week. And what would have happened if I hadn’t sent it in by Friday? I could be sued by Companies House.

Now, I’m not saying there’s a conflict of interest here, but surely if the inefficiency of Companies House can subsequently bring extra money (in the form of legal costs, fines etc.) into the coffers of – um – Companies House, then there’s something wrong with that equation…

As it is, I’ve now done it all online, and sent it in. I just hope I don’t go through the farce of previous years about whether the motherfuckers have received it or not. I may back myself up, and send in a copy by post too. After all, I’ve already paid the £15 for the online one, so it shouldn’t be a problem to duplicate it…

*mutter* *snarl* favicons

I love the idea behind favicons. What’s a favicon? The little picture up on the titlebar beside the name of some websites, in some browsers. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a yellow square with “d4d” on it while looking at this site. But you may not.

And that’s what’s frustrating about them – they’re not standards-compliant, and there’s not even any compatibility between browsers about what works best. IE supposedly likes them, Opera doesn’t, and Firefox sometimes likes them and sometimes doesn’t. No-one seems able to decide whether they should be 16×16 or 32×32 pixels, 8bit, 16bit or 32bit colour, or really bloody anything.

Over the weekend, I realised that the website for my company didn’t have a favicon – it’s nothing special, doesn’t alter the functionality, but I do like the idea of favicons, particularly when using tabbed browsing, such as in Firefox. It makes each tab instantly recognisable. Well, it does so long as the keffing things work.

Of course, for some reason (as yet still unknown) the favicons I was using didn’t work. No idea why, and now it’s working again (although on an older version than the one that’s now been loaded onto the site) and I’m still utterly clueless about why it’s happening. Grrr. Why is it that it’s always the small “simple” things that take up so much time?

Colour Me Stunned

In yet another “File Under : Sherlock, Shit, No” moment, the Mental Health Foundation has published the results of a survey today.

And the conclusion of this survey? Low moods can be beaten by having someone to talk to, or by being hugged. I kid ye not. Now, how amazed are you by this revelation? I know it left me utterly flabbergasted. To think, just having a hug (or a shag) makes you feel better. Fucking hell, Holmes, you’ve got something there. It might even be a solution!

I’m far more interested in knowing how many depressives considered “punching the twat who’s just said ‘cheer up, luv, it might never ‘appen!’” as a viable option for its mood-lifting properties.

On The Edge

One thing that a lot of people don’t know about me is that once I hit a certain point in the depression/stress cycle, all I do is sleep. It’s an evasion manoeuvre, I know – and it’s the big signpost for me that things have gone Far Enough. (Intentional capitals) This Easter weekend has demonstrated that part of me quite impressively. I’ve slept for about 45 hours over four days. If anyone had been here to try and wake me up before I was ready, I suspect that (as has happened before) I wouldn’t have woken up. On previous occasions that’s worried people enough that I’ve woken up in hospital – no memory of getting there, nor of paramedics etc. using what can only be described as painful methods of rousing an unconcscious patient. Which is, of course, stressful in itself.

Thankfully, this time there’s been no-one around, and I’ve just been able to sleep for the time that my brain/body required. I feel almost human for it – my body-clock is still utterly wazzed, but that’s nothing unusual. Now we’ll just see how the return to normality (or at least my version of it) goes tomorrow.

It’s Oh So Quiet

I’ve been out for a walk today – and I can’t believe just how quiet it is outside. Amazingly, the supermarkets appear to all be shut – miracles never cease – and the only slight sound is that of traffic. Walk a short distance off the street into Clayton Vale and it’s a glorious day, far quieter than a normal. Lovely.

Incendiary

I can’t wait to see what Maria has to say about the story in today’s Guardian about a domestic abuse ‘expert’ who believes that acts of domestic violence are a defence response to undetected panic attacks.

I’ve never been involved in domestic abuse, and hopefully never will be – so I can’t really say what provokes certain men to want to abuse their partners, but from what other people have told me, it’s more about the abuser being insecure and feeling the need to display their “power” over their partner, to show their “superiority” by assaulting them. To be the attacker is (supposedly) to be the powerful one. That doesn’t sound like a panic attack to me, but as I said, I’m no expert.

Money ≠ Sense

Unbelievable. A “tycoon” has spent £70m on a London mansion. Fair enough, it’s a 12-bedroom place in Kensington Palace Gardens. But bloody hell, £70m? More money than sense.

Euro-advertising

While most adverts are bloody annoying, I have to say that the ones I find to be the worst are the ones that are made for an entire continent at once, with just bad dubbing and no lip-syncing to put them into each country’s preferred language.

Sleep, pt. 2

As if I needed any further proof that the last week had been major evidence of my being right on the shaky edge of a burnout, I’ve been doing some major sleeping this weekend already. 13 hours Thursday into Friday, and 7 hours last night. Gawd knows what I’ll manage to do tonight, but I’m hoping that it’ll be more of the same. A quiet Easter weekend, and plenty of sleep – just what the doctor would’ve ordered, if a) I ever went to see doctors, and b) they didn’t just enjoy prescribing Happy Pills® with little to no further investigation.

Happy

Yes, it was a good night too. Seeing friends, and then added beer, curry, and DVDs. And just to top it off, finding out where my copy of Angels on Fire had been hiding, which means I don’t have to fork out for a new (well, pre-owned) copy. A good night all round. Now if only I could persuade my body that today is actually Saturday, not a second Sunday.

Sleep

Well, you could say I’ve caught up on some sleep. It’s 1pm, and I’ve just crawled out of the pit. Do I feel better for it? I’ll let you know when my brain wakes up and is capable of conscious thought.

And yes, that does make it – for me at least – a very Good Friday. *grin*

Conversation

It’s a dying art…

Heard in the town centre today

“‘ello, alright?“
“Oh, alright?
How’s you? Alright?“

Shudder

Yick, Yick, Yick. I’m sorry, but who on earth would even _want_ to have a piece of platinum inserted into their eyeball?

Looming

Thank God that this working week is nearly over. Four days off are looming in front, and the alarm is already off in anticipation of tomorrow morning.

For the first time in what seems like months (in truth it’s “only” since the 31st Jan/1st Feb) I’ve got a weekend in the house to myself. No real social events planned – I’ll be seeing friends on Friday, but it’s not a big do or anything, and is more likely to involve beer, curry, and DVDs. Which works for me.

So yes, a quiet weekend for the first time in just over two months. It’s going to be nice. I’ll probably still end up doing a fair amount of stuff, but I’m determined to not enter “running round like a mad twadge” mode. Cinema is likely to happen, as I want to see Shaun of the Dead, Monster, and (if I get the chance) 21 Grams. Passion of the Christ also appeals, although as Mike says, some people just don’t seem to get it.

Other than that, catching up on sleep, and probably doing very little geeky stuff – and that sounds like a good Easter weekend to me.