chocolate and vodka

Oops

2003-09-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

To everyone I accidentally sent over here after my 'I've moved' email, sorry! You really need to be here instead. Put it down to a long week and a shortness of braincells!!

Chocolate and Vodka permanently moves

2003-06-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

I've decided. CnV is off to Blog-City forever. Please update your links, bookmarks, whatever, with my new address: http://chocnvodka.blog-city.com/.

The archives will remain here until, well, until blog*spot kicks me off. ;)

still can't decide...

2003-06-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

I don't seem able to fix that Keanu post, which is really bugging me now. Still not sure if I am going to move everything over to Blog-City or stay with Blogger. I guess it depends on whether I can move my archives over or not. I have bigger things to worry about right now, though, but somehow this blog has become important. And I don't like having this knackered post ruining my archives.

Ah well, we'll see. I'll just carry on cross-posting for a while and see what gives.

The Beagle's away, and the Celts are still everywhere, maybe

2003-06-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

At long last, Mars Express and the Beagle II lander are safely away! Launched today in a Russian Soyuz rocket, it’s sending back telemetry and all systems are functioning normally.

We now have only six months to wait before it reaches Mars, when we will find out if the ESA knows the difference between yards and meters. Call me biased, but my money is on a yes to that.

NASA, of course, with all its super-duper fandangally pretty American technology and super-duper ohlookdidwereallywasteallthatmoney budget, is also launching Mars probes this month, although I’m not sure whether JPL have yet managed to learn how to count to ten with out taking off their shoes and socks.

For all their attempts to strut their stuff as the world’s leading space exploration agency, NASA couldn’t tie their own shoelaces without instructions and some nice big diagrams.

They haemorrhage money through inefficiency and incompetence, and their shiny mantra of "better faster cheaper" has ended up costing them dearly, and not just in terms of cold hard cash. The loss of both the Mars Orbiter and Polar Lander missions were serious PR disasters in themselves, but the cost in human, PR and scientific terms of the Columbia catastrophe is uncountable.

On the other hand, the ESA have been seen as also-rans for some time now, but with the launch of Mars Express and Beagle II, they prove that you can do real science in space on a tight budget, you just have to be a bit inventive about it.

I really hope that we get to hear the obvious line "The Beagle Has Landed" in six months time, and that we get some high quality data back from the red planet. Not only would it be a poke in NASA’s eye, but it would also give a huge boost to European space exploration.

After all, there’s no rule that says we can’t do it a lot better, cheaper and faster than NASA.

Meantime, though, the damn Celts are everywhere. Maybe.

The NY Times (registration required) and the International Herald Tribune both run stories on research that was done last year into the ancestry of a selection of British males which discovered that actually, the English aren’t all Anglo-Saxons, but often Celts. This implies, they say, that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t drive out the Celts, but married them instead.

The BBC commissioned the research for their tediously dull series Blood of the Vikings, which was about as watchable as a wallful of Dulux’s newest colour. The data has now been published in Current Biology, a medical rag where I used to work, hence, I think, people jumping on what is actually quite an old story.

(Well, they’re not jumping on the story because I used to work for Current Biology. Obviously. Although as an aside I would like to say that that particular job, as Editorial Assistant, does remain my longest ever job, and I left there in May 96. I was there nearly two years and jumped shortly before I was pushed, having become office photocopier queen and thus realising that there was, therefore, nothing left to achieve.)

It’s also an old story that’s contradicted by this piece on the BBC Wales website which discusses research showing that the Welsh are genetically different to the English. This suggests that the idea that the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Celts out of England into the Celtic fringe of Wales, Ireland and Scotland is actually more accurate than the theory that everyone got on spiffingly, shagged and made babies.

Me, I know the Welsh are different. They don’t have the laundry gene for one.

my other blog

2003-06-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

Until I can fix the godawful mess I've made of this blog, you can read entries at my other blog.

blerugh

2003-06-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

i've killed it.

More Matrix stuff...

2003-06-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've been having an ongoing discussion as regards Mr Reeves over on Sweet Addy. There is one faction that believes that Mr Reeves is not quite the talentless jerk that some people would like to paint him as. There is another faction which believes that Mr Reeves is so thick that he coudn't find his own arse without directions.

Me, well I believe that there are some actors, like some bands, that it's fashionable to hate. Maybe they're not the best at what they do. Maybe they've made some bad calls in the past. Maybe some things they've done haven't turned out too well. But somehow this gets translated into a real hatred, and I don't understand that. It's one thing not to like a certain film or certain music, but somehow this dislike of the end product gets translated into a real hatred of the purveyor. "I really fucking hate Grandaddy" or "I really fucking hate Keanu Reeves".

Calm down guys, there are more worthy people to hate in this world. Like Bush.

Anyway, how can anyone hate Keanu? I mean, really? Look at those big brown eyes and tell me he's not the cutest thing? Failing that, read this and tell me you don't have at the very least some grudging respect for the man.

Two headed tortoise

2003-05-31T12:46:00.000-07:00

In South Africa recently was born a two headed tortoise. It seems that the tortoise is doing well, eating with both of its mouths and generally acting tortoisy. Unfortunately, one head seems to operate the front pair of legs, and the other head operates the back pair, which makes for a grand total of going nowhere when the tortoise is panicked.

Now, the BBC piece left it there, but don’t you think this begs a few questions? Like, has the tortoise’s nervous system been split in two with one head getting the front half and the other head getting the back half? Or have the heads simply apportioned responsibility for different sectors of one nervous system?

Something like either of those two scenarios has to have happened because if you had both heads controlling the same part of the body then you could end up with some bizarre mental fracas going on with both heads trying to get the same leg to do different things, for example.

And what happens if one head wants to go in a different direction to the other head? Or if they argue?

I don’t know much about the physiology of two-headed tortoises, but I find myself strangely curious.

Reality bytes

2003-05-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

Salam Pax has been getting some shit lately, from people who don’t believe he’s real. The rumours are that Salam’s some sort of agent or spy, or maybe not even in Baghdad at all but quietly forging his blog from some comfy pad in Kansas.

Then there’s a bevy of other pieces quietly affirming that Salam Pax is real, is in Baghdad and isn’t an agent or spy but a simply architect with attitude. Chief amongst the believers is Rory McCarthy at The Guardian, whom one would imagine probably has the inside story considering that he’s managed to persuade Salam to write a column.

Somehow, I doubt very much that the Guardian would be publicising their newest, shiniest recruit if he was in fact some bird called Dorothy from Kansas.

The thing is, I don’t know jack shit about Iraq really. I know that I didn’t like the war, and that I wasn’t (and am not) happy about the way that the government lied to us, or the way that Blair has allowed himself (and thus the UK) to become the lapdog of the maniac Bush.

I know that I was astounded (in a good way) by the number of people who protested against the war, and I know that this whole affair has been a wake-up call for the apathetic who have suddenly discovered that they are not willing to sit by and watch whilst atrocities are committed in our name.

I also know that I do not trust the media to tell me the truth, nor the government. Both have lied and been caught lying throughout the entire episode, and I have no doubt that both will continue to lie for as long as they can get away with it.

Salam Pax is a lone voice in all this. One man telling his story, explaining his reality as he sees it, and he sees it in a way that no one else (online) does. His intelligent prose goes a long way towards showing us what life is really like in Iraq right now, for him, his colleagues and his family.

Salam also goes a long way to undoing some of the propaganda that’s been forced down our throats (and which some netizens seem only to eager to swallow with pride and patriotic fervour) by the American and British governments and media.

See, I know I’ve said this before, but it seems to me that the authorities want us to view Iraqis either as The Enemy, to be exterminated and shown no mercy, or the Poor Pitiful Peasants incapable of doing anything for themselves and therefore reliant on ‘our’ kindness and generosity. Oh, look at us, the redeeming forces here to save your souls from the foul evil of your own culture and country.

Salam gives the lie to this - he is intelligent, articulate, well informed and savvy. He presents his viewpoints in an articulate and engaging way and we get to see through his eyes a human story. It’s just one of the uncountable stories in Iraq right now, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

And this is, I think, why certain individuals have an issue with Salam. He’s smarter than they are, more intelligent, more articulate. In fact, that’s what makes them so suspicious - how could an Iraqi be so intelligent and speak such good English? How could he possibly know so much about American culture?

Er, hello? Wake up! Smell the roses! American culture gets everywhere, like creeping slime mould. I’d be more shocked if the obviously well educated Salam didn’t know about American culture.

But in all the furore over Salam, people have really lost sight of what he is doing. He’s writing a blog - a personal account of his life. He’s not there to document the war and post-war collapse of Iraq. He’s not there to uncover Saddam’s crimes and those of the Ba’athists. He’s telling us what goes on his world, what’s happening in his life, and we need to remember that in order to keep things in perspective. This is one man’s viewpoint, not some history book in the writing.

A happy side effect of Salam’s blog is that he’s educating some of us as to what life is like outside of our cushy little countries, those of us open-minded enough to take in what he’s saying of course. The others he’s just pissing off, which is frankly scores some serious points with me. Anyone who pisses off narrow minded racist middle-classes elitist fat-bellied Americans is right at the top of my party invite list.

So yeah, Salam, you’re welcome round mine anytime, although I can promise you that you’ll not be overly impressed at what passes for architecture round here.

All this discussion about whether or not Salam is real, though, has bugged me today. Not just because I’m a Salam believer and sympathiser, but because this whole online reality thing is major food for thought in my own life right now and has been for some time.

I really am fed up of people telling me that you can’t get to know people online, and that online friendships are somehow flawed.

"Oh, but you never really know them," they say. "How can you tell that they are who they say they are?"

Tell me something, please. Email me - my address is over there on the left… no, the other left… ( ;-) ) and it works, really. Or leave a comment.

How do you know that anyone is who they say they are? I’ve been taken in by people before, people I’ve met, people that have seemed perfectly normal and reasonable and nice. Then three months down the line, or three years, whatever, they have shat upon me from a great height.

On one particularly notable occasion, I employed a guy as a sales rep for a company I was running. Seemed like a charming enough guy, had a reasonable CV, couldn’t immediately see anything wrong with him at all. So we gave him the job. Things didn’t go so well, he didn’t get any sales and the company was floundering, so we ditched him, as you do.

So, in a perfectly natural reaction, he harassed us by phone. He’d ring up several times a day and as soon as anyone answered the phone, he’d hang up. To start with, you don’t think anything of it, but when it keeps happening again and again and again it starts to bug you. Then it starts to worry you. Then is starts to piss you off. Then you realise that if you keep reacting to it, he’s fucking won.

We did a bit of research then, and oh boy, oh boy, do I wish I’d known some of the things I found out then before I’d given the freak the job! He’d been fired from his previous job for sexually harassing the boss’s wife. He was running a dodgy business from a non-address… oh I could go on, but I won’t.

The irony is that I would never have found out this stuff if it weren’t for the fact that I was now in the same boat as his previous employers. They were all rather unwilling to talk to me until they knew that I was suffering the same thing that they had. If I had rung up before giving him the job, they would not have spoken to me, because giving references now has become so dodgy in terms of slander/libel that may people simply won’t do it.

So my point is this - at which point in the past were people ever always who they say they are? Why has this issue of identity been flagged up as unique to the online environment when it’s an ages old issue that’s never gone away and probably never will?

On the one hand, you could say that the internet makes it easier to be someone you’re not, but on the other hand, it’s the internet that allows people to check their facts, if they can be bothered to look. The resources are out there to help you find out about someone if that’s what you want to do, and it’s infinitely easier to do precisely because of the net.

I’m no expert on digging for personal information online, but even I managed to find out stuff about our ex-employee that gave me pause. I never would have located that info offline, that’s for sure.

Within most of us there is an inherent instinct to trust. It’s hardwired into us, a part of our physical make-up. If you have oxytocin in your brain (which you do) then you have trust, according to the New Scientist (password required but you can get a free 7 day trial).

This instinctive trust is what makes the world work - without it, you can’t be a part of any kind of social group. And that’s just as much the case online as it is offline. Ok, so you’re missing the visual clues online, but you have other clues in the way that people write, the language they use and the way they react, and with a bit of experience you do get to pick up on whether or not someone is talking shit.

I’ve been online for seven years, and I’ve met a lot of people online whom I have subsequently met offline and I don’t think I’ve ever been wildly wrong about any of them. This is not to mean that I’ve not subsequently misjudged people, but on the whole the number of nutters per square inch has been pretty low. One, actually, and although he was hammer-wielding he wasn’t in my presence at the time and it was only his computer which suffered.

I’ve met some pricks, obviously, via the net, but then I’ve met many more in real life. No environment, or country, has a monopoly on pricks nor is anywhere exempt from their presence. It’s just one of this irritating things in life, like the way it rains whenever you don’t have your umbrella, or the way that you wait for hours and then three buses come along at once.

The internet isn’t full of axe-wielding murderers. It’s not full of liars. It’s full of people, the majority of whom are simply saying it as they see it. You may disagree with them, you may not like them, you may think that they are pricks. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all Dorothys, pulling the wool over your eyes from Kansas, and if you really think that it does, you need to see a psychologist pretty soon about your paranoia.

Junior Senior

2003-05-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Ooh, I like this. Oh yes I do.

Another good idea

2003-05-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

According to Journalism.co.uk:

Web guru Steve Outing has urged online publications to improve their journalistic 'talent' by scouting for bloggers.

I think that’s a fine idea, yes! Someone somewhere should pay me large amounts of money to talk shit for a living. I’m expert at it - been doing it all my life for fun, so why not do it for money? I always said that if only I could find someone willing to pay me to talk crap, I could make a small fortune.

Sadly, though, I suspect that online publications are about as capable of picking up a good blogger as Business Link are of ever making a decision.

Blogwise

2003-05-29T01:56:00.000-07:00

I'm listed on Blogwise now. I've had one click and rank 4153rd. LMAO. I'd make some quip about watching my blog plummet through the ranks, but I'm not sure there's anywhere to plummet to. Anyway, Blogwise is a good idea, I think - there has to be some sort of index of blogs that does more than give you a rank and a URL.

Bum

2003-05-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

Forgot to set the video before I went to bed last night, so missed my interview this morning. I think maybe that was my subconscious kicking in. I'm not sure that I'm not entirely happy not knowing how stupid I sounded.

Be' tisha gwybod?

2003-05-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

Weird day today. The interview with Irfon Jones from Radio Cymru was brought forward to today, which meant less time to prepare, but also less time to get nervous. I don’t really do nerves, though, not beforehand. I get kinda calm before something scary. Then I fall apart afterwards.

I have to say, Irfon was lovely. I wouldn’t have had a problem with doing an interview with him at all if it were in English. I’ve done a few during the last year and, whilst the first few wigged me out somewhat (I’m much more used to being the interviewer than the interviewee), I’ve started to get used to it. It’s a business thing. I need to promote my business, so I need interviews. Easy.

But the idea of doing radio in Welsh, well… That’s a whole nother ball game. There’s this lag… My comprehension isn’t perfect, so I hear the sounds and there’s a pause whilst my brain sorts them out into words. Then I have to figure out what those words mean. Then I have to think of a response and then I have to think of how to say that in Welsh.

Disappointingly, I was thinking in English and stumbling over my Welsh. Usually when I speak in Welsh I try to think in Welsh - and it makes a big difference. Today, I thought in English and spoke in gibberish.

And I giggled. Gah. I knew I would either corpse or freeze, and I corpsed.

Still, it wasn’t live, and Irfon was very sympathetic and promised that they could edit something together from the shite that pour forth from my gob. I think I would have been better if I’d known in more detail what they wanted to talk about. I was expecting the competition questions, but not the questions about me, and why I started learning Welsh, how I learnt, stuff like that.

It’s so hard to explain to someone why I started learning Welsh, because I don’t really know myself. It was almost arbitrary. I wanted another language, any other language and Welsh won out by default because, five years down the line, I’m still learning. I’ve tried Polish, Russian, Dutch, French, Latin, Cornish, Norwegian, Swahili… the list goes on.

It’s an accident that I now speak Welsh, not part of some grand design. But try telling that to people. They don’t understand that you can do something like this by accident. But the thing is, people kept emailing me in Welsh and I had to translate in order to reply to them. Learning was almost a side effect.

But anyway, apparently my Welsh is better than some Welsh people’s Welsh, so I guess it will be ok. I shall tape it tomorrow morning (it’s on before I get up), and hope that I don’t sound too much like a twat.

Anyway, like I say, I get really nervy after the event. I’ve always been like that. When I did stand up, I used to be really horribly calm beforehand, then just go to pieces afterwards. I did that today too. The only thing I could think of afterwards was to call J in Australia, just to hear his voice to calm me down. If he could have seen me, pacing round my flat, riddled with nerves, I think he would have pissed himself laughing.

Still, glad it's all over. I can get back to my Matrix obsession now, until it wears off, of course.

Get your Matrix here...

2003-05-28T00:35:00.000-07:00

I was looking for Matrix stuff on Slsk the other day (although I didn't find anything worth getting), and was quite surprised to see a file of the Matrix Reloaded for download. I didn't really believe that it was actually the Matrix Reloaded though, so I ignored it. Not that I would have downloaded it even if I had believed it, cos I want that full-on cinema experience rather than to watch some crappy pirated copy playing jerkily on a computer that can't really handle it. But according to the Beeb it's not a crappy pirated copy that's doing the round, but a copy taken from a film print complete with surround sound. Someone somewhere's quick off the mark.

I think, though, that there's an upside to all this. The Matrix Reloaded was released worldwide two weeks ago to avoid piracy, and I think that's a good thing. I really hate it when you have a film released in America months before it comes out here. What's the point of that? Just to make us wait longer and get all annoyed at it? I presume they do it because they're a bunch of cheapskates who don't want to pay for the number of prints required to give a film worldwide release, but with the amount of money some of these films make, that's a pretty weak excuse in my opinion.

DVDs, the Matrix (again) and cachu planciau (that's "shitting planks" in English)

2003-05-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

I found out today that this ‘new’ computer of mine can’t play DVDs, and I’m gutted. I was going to treat myself to the Matrix DVD but I’ve had to go for the video instead. I almost never buy videos. In all my adult life, I’ve bought maybe twenty videos. Most of them have been either Eddie Izzard, or Newman and Baddiel (which shows you just how rarely I buy them).

I started to get into the whole DVD thing when I bought Spider-Man and then felt compelled to go buy everything else that Tobey Maguire has ever done, and I really can see the attraction now. It’s not that I don’t or didn’t like film - I love film. I used to go to the flicks almost every Monday, cos it was half-price, and I’d see whatever was on. Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Speed, Stargate.

Oh yeah, seeing Speed sitting in the front row of the Screen on Baker Street was just fantastic. Talk about peripheral vision - that close to and the screen’s virtually wrap-around. Ah, those were the days. I worked just round the corner from the Tottenham Court Road screen, so it was all very convenient. Then I moved jobs (jumped just slightly before I was pushed), moved house (from the very convenient Tooting to the totally inconvenient and lacking in any advantages whatsoever Hounslow) and my movie going kinda slacked off a bit.

Now, of course, I’m here in urban isolation and organising a trip to the flicks is a major hassle. I should get into going on my own, but I really hate that. Kate and I went to see the second Harry Potter a while back, and fair near pissed ourselves laughing, particularly during some of the allegedly scary scenes. We were just howling, and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have had that moment had I been on my own. I like to feed off the reactions of people around me, if you know what I mean.

My very first DVD ever was the Super Furry Animals’ Rings Around The World album. I rarely play it though, mainly cos what’s the point? I have the album, and I play that a lot (it’s on right now, actually), but the DVD is just kinda a keepsake.

I actually only own six now, that and the five Tobey films I’ve managed to buy. What a collection! Film 2004 will be ringing me up and asking me to present just as soon as they find out.

And of course, as I’ve said before, I don’t have a DVD player. Although now the urge to max out my credit card and get one is stronger than ever. But I’m going to resist, because I need to save my pennies for America.

I didn’t manage to apply the same philosophy to the Matrix video though, no matter how much I hate the things. I mean, with all that annoying tape that goes all frilly and unwatchable as soon as you put them in the player. Horrid things.

But my need for a fix of Neo overcame my distaste and impecuniousness and I bought the video anyway. Once I’ve had my fill (i.e. when I have a DVD player and the Matrix DVD), I will take the poor wee thing, tuck a little note in the cover and set it free on a train somewhere, a la Book Crossing.

In other news today, I had a phone call from Radio Cymru (that’s a Welsh language radio station, in case you were wondering) and they want to interview me, in Welsh, about the competition for Welsh writers that I’m running along with Academi. My initial reaction was to immediately start cachu planciau, but I agreed to do it anyway, despite worrying that my Welsh isn’t up to it.

They’re going to call me at 1pm on Thursday and we’ll pre-record it on the phone. Which is fine by me - they’ll be able to edit out my long and painful pauses, and I’ll get the chance to think about what I want to say before I say it. I shall have to put together crib sheets so that if I freeze up I’ll still have something to say.

Mind you, I did a TV interview in Welsh last year, and that was fine, so I guess this will be too.

Right, I’m done here for the night. I’ve cracked open a bottle of white, and I’m going to sit down and spend a happy 130 minutes in the company of Neo.

Ta ra.

IOC gets head stuck irreversibly up arse

2003-05-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

It seems that the International Olympic Committee has finally lost its collective head somewhere in its collective lower intestine, and has decided to ban wild card entries into the Olympics. This means no more Eddie the Eagle, soaring gracelessly through our skies as we all hold our breath, hoping ferverently that he doesn't break anything when he lands. No more Eric "the Eel" Moussambani, struggling not only to complete the 100m swim, but also to keep himself from drowning.

This is a sad day for the Olympics - most of us will never be an Olympic athlete, or even an athlete of any sort. Unless sitting at a computer for 18 hours a day suddenly becomes an Olympic sport, in which case I may be in with a chance. But people like Eddie and Eric, somewhat patronisingly called 'characters', were our representatives there. We'll never know what it's like to compete on that kind of stage, but they did, and they did it for us. They had guts, they had nerves of steel, they didn't mind making prats out of themselves for our entertainment, and their triumphs (of not breaking their spines or drowning) were far greater than that of winning a gold medal, because they started the competition knowing that they could never, ever win, yet they competed anyway. That, as far as I'm concerned, is true Olympic spirit.

Computer Hell or How I Came to Hate My PC Even More Than I Used To

2003-05-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

I’d become quite used to my computer rebooting itself, without a by-your-leave from me. The monitor would just go black with a faint click, then up would fade the green energy saving logo and the white text of the computer doing its start up thing. It was irritating, sure. Inconvenient, yes. But I’d got used to it in much the same way as you get used to a bed with lumps in.

I’d also become used to seeing the Blue Screen of Death which would make its presence felt at least once every couple of days. In fact, I’d become so used to restarting my machine when programmes hung or crashed, or when some fatal exception had occurred, that it was almost second nature to hit the reboot button. Or, more accurately, find a pointy object with which to poke the tiny reboot buttonette into submission.

Usually it would go click, hum, whirr and we’d be off again on that rollercoaster of manic saving and praying that the damn thing doesn’t crash at a critical juncture. How I love Microsoft. No, really, with all my heart. Pure, unadulterated adoration.

I sense you don’t believe me. You might have a point.

Despite all this, however, I was not prepared for the Flashing Blue, Green and Red Screen of Death, the one that complains of no signal and which can’t be cured by a good poke with a sharp implement.

Typically, my computer’s death throes happened shortly before I was due to leave the house to catch the train up to London to go see Hot Hot Heat, a band with a singer whose hair is a spectacle in itself. Like a great big copper soufflé that quietly deflates as the gig proceeds.

A couple of vodkas in to the evening and my woes were, if not forgotten then certainly relegated to the back of my mind. Instead, I enjoyed singing ‘Bandages’ very loudly and having a good dance, even when those about me seemed determined to be miserable as fuck.

I don’t know what it is about a London crowd that makes them so stand-offish, but they just mope about like a bunch of prunes, arms crossed, daring the band to impress them as if it’s beneath them to boogie on down and visibly have fun.

I never understood that attitude myself. I mean, have they come out to enjoy themselves or what? And if it’s an ‘or what’, then why don’t they just bugger off home and stop clogging up the bar, so that those of us there to have a good night out can do just that without their wanky London cool getting in the way.

Anyway, their wanky London cool didn’t get in my way. Svetla and I got a good vantage point on the balcony (it was at the Electric Ballroom, in case you were wondering) and I marvelled at the way that the singer’s voice sounded just like it does on the record. Very… unique, shall we say. Damn fine gig. I haven’t seen a mic swung with quite that much insouciance since I last saw Jarvis Cocker play live, strutting his stuff like a peacock with an eating disorder.

So, Friday was spent feeling pretty knackered – not so much from the late night, but more from the fact that I got precisely no sleep whatsoever as Svetla’s sofabed is the most uncomfortable known to man. I would have been better off on the floorboards, frankly, and next time I stay there I might just suggest that as the preferable alternative.

Once home, I got precisely nowhere in terms of diagnosing the problem with my computer. I spoke to a number of IT spods, who between them suggested that it could be the video card, the chip or the motherboard. Or possibly something else entirely. They couldn’t really say over the phone and it would be anything up to £750 to get it diagnosed and fixed. And I’m guessing that’s without parts.

So, I did what any self-respecting businesswoman does in times of dire need, I rang my Dad and begged. Of course, it worked. Saturday he drove up from Dorset with my Mum’s computer, the sacrificial lamb, and transferred my c: over to her box, fixing all that needed to be fixed in order to make the blasted thing work.

By the time he left, it was running like a three legged dog, but it was at least running. I had a dll problem, which prevented me getting at my email, MSN or having a firewall, but that seemed like a small price to pay for at least having a functional computer.

Yesterday I did what anyone would do, and tried to fix the dll issue. I looked up a few articles on the internet, couldn’t really make much sense of them, so did what seemed sensible.

No, really, it did seem sensible. Looking back, I should have known that it wasn’t sensible, but it’s not such a stupid mistake to make. After all, the broken dll is a windows system file. Evesham, in their wisdom, decided not to give me the windows disk when I bought the computer, which frankly shouldn’t be allowed. After all, I’ve bought the bloody software, no matter how shite it is, and I should have the proper cd. So, no Win 98 disk, but I did have some Evesham ‘emergency’ disk.

Well, I thought, this is an emergency. I’ll shove it in and see what happens.

What happened was that it gave me the option of restoring my windows files. And that seemed sensible. It seemed very simple to me – a windows file is broken, therefore why not restore it?

Needless to say, restoring the windows files killed the computer very nearly stone dead. All the hard work my Dad had put in to fixing up this computer to that it was at least 90% functional, and I managed in one fell swoop to reduce that to 10%.

I could have kicked myself. I could have cried. Instead there were several frantic phone calls to various assorted people in an attempt to find a fix, until eventually I bit the bullet, rang Dad and confessed that I’d undone all his hard work.

It took us an hour to fix it, but we did get it done eventually. And this morning I did manage to get the dll issue sorted, so now I have a fully (I think… I hope!) functional computer again.

Although it still runs like a three legged dog. Oh yes, I can download the spanky new trailer for Matrix Reloaded, but I can’t really watch it… not without Keanu looking like someone’s got him on strings. Although that may possibly be because they actually did.

I’m going to leave my Matrix rant til after I’ve seen Reloaded, I think. I only saw The Matrix last week for the first time (having been comatose in Dorset at the time that it came out, I think). I loved it. I loved it to bits. Hugely. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting, and I think my timing was pretty good for a change as I’m hopefully going to go see Reloaded on Friday, so I get the full wham and bam, and only have to wait til September for the thank you ma’am.

But I won’t get into what I think of it right now, suffice to say that Keanu Reeves in skintight black really is a nice sight. Oh yes. Start spelling hot with a w and several ts...

Right, I’ll leave it there then, shall I?

Endnote: I really want a Mac.

My computer runs like a three legged dog

2003-05-26T02:32:00.000-07:00

Well, the last few days have been a particular brand of not fun, due to my computer dying last Thursday, just as I was about to leave the house for the Hot Hot Heat gig. It’s likely to be the video card, motherboard or chip. I’m not sure which, because I can’t afford to get it fixed. Instead, my Dad came up with my Mum’s computer and we put my HD in her box and that seems to work almost ok. I would say I have 90% functionality, which means that business is not about to go into meltdown (although my brain is). I just have to fix this keyboard (which is all weird and jerky and ruining my typing), and some dll problems.

Anyway, I’ll blog in more detail later.

Green mammals

2003-05-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

I was complaining today about the lack of green mammals in the world. I mean, green's a common colour, right? Grass is green. Trees are green. Shrubbery is green. So why no green mammals? Surely it'd make great camouflage?

Now, I know there's a sloth that has green algae growing on it, but that doesn't really count. And there was that green kitten a while back, but to be honest it looked more kinda yellow than green to me.

But now there is a green rabbit. Well, it's white in white light but under ultraviolet it fluoresces green. How cool is that? Ok, so they've done a little manipulation by adding in a jellyfish gene to create the glowing green effect, but still, it's green! Gets my thumbs up!

Sleep and The Ice Storm

2003-05-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

Sleep. That was my mission this weekend. Sleep and the forcible removal of work from the agenda. I think I’ve succeeded on both counts. I’ve spent 21 of the last 48 hours asleep, and fully intend to squeeze in another nine hours before Monday starts back with the tedium. I’ve managed to actually not do anything too remotely worklike as well. I had planned to do some stuff today, but I’d rather get up at 6am tomorrow to do it instead.

Trouble is, I have become somewhat institutionalised over the 14 months. I’m used to either working or thinking about work. When I’m not working, I tend to be waiting. I wait for a variety of things - people to come online, answers to email, something half decent to come on TV.

I really don’t much like waiting - it disengages you from your own life. You become a spectator, standing on the fringes of the crowd and wondering what’s going on, and whether that man with the large flaming brand is really going to shove it halfway down his own throat in the name of entertainment. You become an observer, instead of a participant.

So, to stave off the waiting today, and to satisfy both my need to do nothing whatsoever and my urge to watch something really bloody miserable, I put the Ice Storm DVD on.

Dysfunction. Denial. Death. I’m still not sure if I actually like this film or not. This was one of the films where I read the script first and tried to get to grips with the idea of the film before seeing it. I tried to bring the whole thing to life in my head before it was brought to life on screen.

When I’d finished reading the script, which I did in one hit, I really had a few problems getting my head round it. I was left with that kinda mildly confused feeling the comes very shortly before the word ‘What?’. Then I watched the film, and things became no clearer at all.

Second time round, I think I’m a bit more aware of the subtle relationships and the stuff that’s communicated by body language and background movements alone. There’s so much in this film that isn’t stated, and it’s so open to interpretation that it’s verging on Daoist.

The obvious theme is one of sexual dysfunction. Ben is fucking his neighbour Janey, because his wife Elena’s not interested any more. Janey’s fucking anything that stops moving long enough, but hating herself for it. Elena’s fucking Janey’s husband Jim but only very briefly (and call me lucky but I didn’t know sex could be quite *that* brief) in the car.

Even the kids are trying to get it on, except Paul can’t figure out how - in an attempt to keep his lecherous friend Francis away from Libbets, the object of his affections, he ends up drugging them both into a coma. And Wendy isn’t quite sure what sex is exactly yet. If she knew a bit more about what went where, she’s have had her leg over a while back, but instead she settles for dry humping with the not quite all there Mikey, and snuggling with his younger brother Sandy.

Really though, the film’s more about communication, and the lack thereof. Ben and Elena aren’t communicating, and frankly with the amount of shit he talks that’s no great surprise. Janey and Jim aren’t talking because he’s never there. Wendy and Mikey/Sandy do nothing more than grunt at each other and hope for the best.

In fact, there’s only one sound relationship in the whole film and that’s the brother-sister bond between Wendy and Paul, or Charles and Charles as they call each other. They are the only two in the whole film to actually communicate at all. And, about normal stuff too.

PAUL
Charles. Have you been keeping out of my shit? Have you refrained from entering the sacred precincts of my room?

WENDY
I have not touched your sh--
(looks at father)
Stuff.

One thing that The Ice Storm does really, really well is make me thankful that my life’s not that fucked up. I think that’s why I watch it. I’m pretty sure that it’s not for any other reason. The acting is a little ropy in places. The gamelan score is ok but a little grating after a while. And you do tend to lose sympathy for the characters as the film progresses and they become irritatingly more and more self-centred.

But at least when it gets to the end you can sigh, and think ‘Thank fuck that’s not me.’

And then go watch Wonder Boys, which is a truly great film.

Lunar eclipses, kevlar knickers and who am I?

2003-05-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

At some point last night, the moon turned a bloody red as the shadow of the earth fell across its face, plunging it eventually into the full darkness of eclipse. I woke at 4am, quite coincidentally after a strange dream about shopping in the rain, and thought I’d get up and have a look. I hauled my sorry arse out of bed and up the stairs and stuck my head out the front door, only to discover that it was raining in reality too.

That’s about typical for the UK. Any sort of heavenly display is traditionally greeted by clouds and pissing rain.

I had some discussions with my Dad about de-training Fflwff yesterday and have now formulated a new strategy.

Firstly, I want to tackle the carpet scratching. I do have a thing for misting plants which I have set to squirt. Previously when Fflwff scratched at the carpet it resulted in her getting a faceful of water. That worked to start with, but then she got canny and started scratching out of squirting range, but within earshot. She’s not stupid, that cat.

I now have a new tactic. Apparently cats don’t like pepper, so the idea is to sprinkle a little on the carpet where she’s been scratching and that will put her off. Cayenne pepper should do the trick, I'm told.

Unfortunately, I don’t like pepper either and refuse to have it in the house, so this means I’ll actually have to go out and buy some. And that I also won’t be going anywhere near the bits of carpet she scratches at. I guess the chances are that both of us will be afflicted for a while with watery eyes and an urge to sneeze, but at least I’ll be a good five feet further away from it than her.

Secondly, that claw-on-door thing. That’s kinda tougher to deal with because she’s outside when she does it, and the only way to get at her to try to get the ‘don’t scratch’ message across is to open the door, which is exactly what she wants you to do, thus reinforcing the behaviour every time.

The only think I can think of is to glue strips of the furry side of velcro horizontally across the door. She scratches, gets her claws caught up the velcro, and soon gives it up as a bad idea. I guess I’ll have to go out and buy some velcro too. Let’s hope that the landlord doesn’t mind having a temporarily fuzzy front door.

Finally, I have to stop asking ‘How high?’ every time Fflwff wants me to jump to attention. Now, that’s easier said than done when you’ve got the entire cosmos tattooed on your butt in tiny puncture wounds, but I’ve figured a way to deal with that. It may seem extreme, and they may be hard to come by, but they’ve got to be worth a try.

Kevlar knickers. That’s what I’m going for. She can try to sink her claws in my arse as much as she likes then, but if kevlar can stop bullets it can damn well stop cat claws.

I do worry about the chaffing though.

On a different note, thanks to Anton at LastManDancing for reciprocating my link and saying nice things about my blog. Sorry about the archives, Anton. I’ve republished them and hopefully you can get at them now, if you really feel the need, although I can’t promise that you’ll find anything interesting in them.

Now, I feel somewhat ingenuous writing synopses of who I am, but one of Anton’s comments was that he couldn’t find out much about me. I guess that’s the strange thing about blogs - it’s a window into someone’s life, but you only get to see a wee fraction of what’s going on. Possibly this particular blog is less of a window, and more of a letterbox. And at that, one of those letterboxes with the funny little brushes that make it almost impossible to push through anything as flimsy and insubstantial as a letter.

Anyway, here goes. My name (not initials) is Suw, I’m owned by cat called Fflwff and I work for myself running an e-learning start-up called Get Fluent which helps people learning Welsh and French. The kindly call it a micro-business, which really just means that I get to do everything. Except make the tea, but that’s only because I don’t drink the stuff.

I am perpetually giving up caffeine, and perpetually falling off the caffeine wagon. I prefer Stolichnaya but will drink any vodka that’s still liquid. (If it’s not liquid, then technically that’s eating.) Lately I’ve been on a Pimms tip though because that’s more of a summery drink and I like to fool myself that July is nearly here.

I live in an upside-down maisonette (bedrooms are downstairs), on the banks of the Kennet River in Berkshire. It sounds more salubrious than it is - the gasometers, alci neighbour and drug dealers up the road give the lie to that. My lounge slopes towards the river, but so far no flooding. Hurrah!

Concorde goes overhead every day, but they recently changed the timetable. It used to be at 11am but now it’s more like 9.30pm. I will miss Concorde when it’s gone. For years, catching a glimpse of it roaring through the skies like a demented swan with swept back wings was deemed lucky in my mind. I was in heaven when I moved to Hounslow. Well, for the few seconds every day that Concorde carved its way across the capital to Heathrow, at least. Most of the rest of my time in Hounslow was hell on toast, but that’s another blog.

I have $3.85 US, and my mobile won’t work when I get to San Francisco.

I don’t know if any of that was pertinent, but the floor is open to questions by comment or email.

And now it's gone...

2003-05-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

What was that all about? Ad's gone now... this is like poltergeist advertising or maybe they're just fucking with my head for the fun of it. Now you see it. Now you don't?

I'm too tired to know. I know on the grand scheme of things working 11 straight days (it'll be 12 tomorrow. A round dozen. How nice.) isn't all that major. But I'm utterly shagged anyway. All I wanna do is curl up in a small ball and let the next 62 days flow past. Two calendar months. Please gods, let me wake up tomorrow and it be July.

Tomorrow I have to really start promoting the new French service. I was gonna do it today, but I had the little matter of the Welsh worksheet to finish off, and it turned any remaining braincells to mush. Oh, that and the 6.30am routine. I can't believe I was working by 7.30am. Probably good that I was because I'd had it by lunchtime.

Ah, enough, enough already. The next entry, I promise, will be coherant, so long as these strange little guerilla ads fuck of and stay fucked off.

Where the fuck did that ad come from?

2003-05-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

I just checked my own blog, cos I have links here I've not bookmarked yet, and suddenly there's this damn ad, right in the middle of my text! I mean, I don't mind ads at the top of the page, where they can be ignored, but this damn ad looks suddenly like it's part of my blog, something I personally put there or endorse. Bah, bloody advertisers! They just get more and more intrusive.

Downloading mp3s is good for the music industry

2003-05-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

I love it when I'm proved right. This from the Guardian:

A new survey confirms what many of us guessed all along, that those evil music fans stealing pirated music from the web are more, not less, likely to go out and buy CDs. The research, from Nielsen NetRatings, showed that nearly 31 million active internet users aged 18 or older downloaded music in the past 30 days, and 71% bought music in the past three months. That figure is way above the average.

On commenting, Fflwff's claws in my arse and dream blogs

2003-05-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

I have the option of either finishing off today’s work now and not having to do it in the morning, or procrastinating by reading some blogs and writing my own. Difficult choice. I think you can tell which path I’m taking.

I couldn’t resist commenting Joho The Blog’s blog. (Is he like Jones the Coal?) It seems that the American government, its collective IQ having been flushed down the pan a long time ago by Bush’s fanaticism, gave the FBI the power to "the power to search your library and book-buying records without probable cause of any crime or intent to commit a crime" in the Patriot Act.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union is fighting back with a campaign to restore American’s right to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover in private without hoards of agents descending upon them and accusing them of commie pinko leanings. Oops, sorry, wrong decade. But you get the point.

I remember reading a while back, when our very own Quasident (like a president but with a browner nose and less spine) was hoping to push through similar legislation to allow any ol’ Dick, Dickwit or Dickless Idiot civil servant to plough through our emails in search of incriminating evidence, that it is in practice impossible to gain any useful information out of such a large amount of data.

It doesn’t matter how swanky you think your algorithms are, we send so much shite by email every second that there just isn’t the processing power available to sieve it all for useful information, even if it was possibly to identify which information would be useful, which it isn’t. The chances of the government finding out anything crucial via data mining are about as good as the chances of NASA ever being able to tell the difference between centimeters and inches.

I can’t help but assume the same is true of trying to data-mine America’s reading list.

The Patriot Act, like so much of Bush’s policy these days, seems less to do with what’s good for the country, and everything to do with him trying to prove that his bollocks are bigger than anyone else’s. Why the fuck can’t someone neuter him? Please? You’ll be doing us all a favour. Maybe if someone snuck up on him during the night and gave him a hefty dose of oestrogen that might do a similar trick.

Anyway, a blog I found at random today was LastManDancing, which is well worth reading, and not only for the tasty cat.

Talking of cats, is there anyway to untrain a cat? Fflwff has developed some very bad habits over the last year and I have no idea how to persuade her to cease her activities. I think it’s because I’m permanently here and therefore permanently available for harassment. I think I’ve mentioned that when she wants me to do something, she creeps up behind me and sinks her claws in my arse in order to get my attention. And I think I’ve mentioned that it works every fucking time.

She’s also now perfected the ‘claw scraping down blackboard’ tactic, substituting the front door for the blackboard but pretty much capturing that teeth-jarringly painful sound quite accurately. Again, I leap to attention because it’s less painful than trying to make her wait.

Finally, as a way of asking to go out she’s started scratching at the carpet by the front door. That’s only if she can’t be arsed to come and puncture mine, of course. I am trying really hard to deal with that one. I can cope with the scars on my butt, and having my entire jaw set on edge by nasty squeaks, but I have £1200 tied up in bond on this place and I do not want my landlord docking cash for a ruined carpet when it comes time to move out.

I should nail something over the offensively frayed section of carpet. I suspect that something should be Fflwff.

Finally, I’ve been thinking a bit recently about people that I wished would blog. Top of my list would be Steven Pinker. I think he’d write a great blog. I really liked Words and Rules and The Language Instinct, both of which have really given me a useful insight into the learning of languages and the way in which our minds work when processing language. Indeed, I’ve been intending for the last year or so to plough through them both and pull out some of the more practical points, and apply them to Get Fluent, but I’ve not had the chance. Another task to go on the end of a frighteningly long list.

I’d also like to see Elliott Smith blog, but I would guess that he's too self-effacing to blog. I suspect that if the idea were ever suggested to him he'd look slightly agog and then explain that he didn’t have anything remotely interesting to say. If only he’d just blog and let us be the judge of that!

(Actually, I’m convinced I have nothing remotely interesting to say either, but I don’t let a little niggle like that stop me. I figure all writing is good practice, and besides, I’m really getting into my stride with this blog thing now.)

Finally, it would have been amazing if Douglas Adams had ever blogged. Such an amazing talent, such wit and perspicacity. A huge loss, even now. There’s no doubt his blog would have been a work of wonder, awe and the kind of immense, cavernous, belly-rippling laughter that results in pulled muscles and gasping for breath.

What if?

2003-05-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

They dropped two planes on Hounslow tonight. I wonder if any of the three houses I used to live in there were hit.

I know Hounslow pretty well and remember only too clearly the howling whine of the jumbos as they’d hurtle right over my house, seeming scarily low some times. You could often smell the aviation fuel, when planes jettisoned it in a dark smudge scraped out across the sky behind them. The planes were a permanent presence, there in your subconscious all the time whether you realised it or not.

I know Heathrow pretty well too - I worked at briefly BAA and spent a lot of lunchtimes over in Terminals, soaking up the atmosphere and excitement - people going on holiday, travelling on business, coming back from the trip of a lifetime maybe.

I have a soft-spot for Heathrow and I hate to say it, but I retain some small fondness for Hounslow too, in a strangely masochistic way. So the docu-drama The Day Britain Stopped held particular interest for me.

The premise is this - a rail and tube strike, combined with heavy pre-Christmas traffic and a couple of accidents on the M25 result in gridlock affecting the majority of the country. (You don’t need to stretch the imagination to see how that might happen. Two inches of snow in January left people trapped in their cars overnight, remember, and all because some idiot couldn’t manage to send the gritters out in time.)

The knock on effects of this kind of travel mayhem could easily cause air traffic control staff to be late, and tired, overworked controllers working an already overloaded and flawed system end up as scapegoats for a mid-air collision over Hounslow.

There was nothing in the programme I’ve just watched that I couldn’t see happening. There were no fantastical leaps of faith that needed to be made, no moments of ‘Oh, that would never happen’, no need to suspend my disbelief. All of it looked far to close to the truth to be comfortable.

But despite the fact that the programme makers did their research and came up with an utterly plausible scenario in order to highlight the pathetic state of the UK’s travel network, will anyone who needs to listen actually take any note? I doubt it.

‘What if?’ is becoming an oft-asked question these days. I’ve mentioned Flood before, the ‘what if’ book that sends a high tide and storm surge up the Thames estuary together to overwhelm the Thames barrier and flood central London up to the 10m mark, and then follows that closely with a major conflagration.

I’m fond of London too, and I know for a fact that the flat I used to inhabit in Rotherhithe would have been flooded. I would certainly have had to have evacuated but, with little or no high ground nearby, I probably would have drowned. Several of the offices I used to work in would also have been deathtraps. At least one of my friends would have been flooded out badly - and I’m not talking just a bit of seepage here but a raging wall of water sweeping aside everything in its path.

Plus there was the smallpox ‘what if’ docu-drama last year, the weak reflections of which we are seeing now with SARS as life thankfully fails to imitate art. In ‘Smallpox 2002’ 60 million people die worldwide, but SARS is nowhere near that potent.

That’s luck, though. No judgement involved. We should be thankful that SARS isn’t more contagious because bad as it has been, it could have been a lot worse. Still, it has seriously put the wind up a lot of people who needed their butts kicking into line a long time ago so maybe the next novel disease might be contained long before it spreads worldwide.

Yet the one thing that runs through all three fictional scenarios as drawn out by programme makers and authors alike is the same thing that is at the core of the SARS problem - the ugly echoes of governmental incompetence when faced with a looming major disaster.

The warning signs are out there. Sometimes they come in the form of real events, sometimes they are from people from whose research can be drawn some frightening conclusions. But how seriously will anyone in government take these warnings? Will anyone bother to sit down and assess the evidence and draw up some sort of contingency plan, just in case?

We all know the transport in the UK is shot to shit because we suffer from it daily. Well, ok, I don’t because my daily commute is about 30s up the stairs, but I did. Two hours to get from here to Farringdon at one point, just after Hatfield. Work then til 7.30pm, say, and another two hours to get home. Or maybe an hour and a half if I was lucky.

The examples of travel mayhem are endless, pretty much like the government’s ability to weasel their way out of any kind of worthwhile commitment to doing what needs to be done, and what needs to be done is a serious amount of investment not only in the pathetic public transport system, but also in roads. I’m as green as the next person, but an efficient and effective road network is a lot more ‘green’ than people sitting in traffic jams for hours.

As for the ineffectiveness of the Thames barrier, the figures given by author Richard Doyle are nothing short of terrifying:

The Thames Barrier was built to a risk level of 1 in 1000. Slightly worse odds than contracting fatal cancer (1 in 3000) and much worse odds than of dying in a traffic accident (1 in 10,000).

Of course, one can always say that this is all nothing more than scaremongering, but surely if there’s a serious risk (and I think 1 in 1000 is serious) then someone really ought to be looking into the situation.

I suspect, however, that the civil servants (who don’t seem to be much in the line of serving anyone these days, if indeed they ever did, nor of being overly civil) with their cushty little numbers will be too busy discussing Eastenders to think beyond the ends of their snotty little noses.

And after the colossal squid

2003-05-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Continuing the seafood theme, last night I dreamt of giant crabs, three foot across with pincers that could crush bricks. They were scuttling up the lane my parents live on, although no explanation as to what they were doing so far from the sea was forthcoming. At least one of them ended up on the barbeque. The other died in a ditch.

I have absolutely no idea what this means, but if anyone understands crab symbolism in dreams, please do let me know.

Oh I forgot...

2003-05-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

I quite often say 'Oi' to the cat as well.

Wikis, squids and MSN

2003-05-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

By the time July comes, I will be long overdue for a holiday. When I woke this morning it felt as if I’d spent most of last night dreaming about wikis. In case you don’t know, a wiki is a web page which is updatable by any member of the public.

At their best wikis are a great tool for sharing information without requiring everyone to join up to some centralised service provider. Sorting out a blog team for 30-something people would be tedious in the extreme, but with a wiki you can just post the page and hope for the best.

Of course, at their worst wikis are unintelligible gobbledegook of no discernible interest to anyone.

I’ve been thinking of starting a wiki at SeedWiki.com for the people over at Sweet Addy so that we can keep our info, such as SoulSeek user names, updated. There’s a thread for this on the noticeboard, but it sinks to the bottom every now and again and whenever someone wants to add a comment they have to trawl through pages and pages of dead threads to find it.

That’s the trouble with noticeboards. Sometimes someone posts something interesting but unless you keep bumping it, it gets lost in the murk.

Anyway, last night I spent all night dreaming about sitting in front of a computer setting up a wiki. So, just for a change, today I spent all day sitting in front of a computer typesetting. Again. I was going to work on the new version of the Get Fluent web site, but I really didn’t have the wherewithal so I spent a mindlessly happy day turning perfectly acceptable black text in to slightly snazzier orange text.

It was fun.

That said, although I’ve worked both yesterday and today, I’ve had frequent breaks which, very wisely I think, I’ve spent sitting in front of my computer staring at really very interesting black text on other people’s blogs. Or installing SquidCam.

I have no idea what the relationship is between SquidCam and those weird and overly rubbery denizens of the deep, but I do sincerely hope that the surviving relatives of the colossal squid found not so long ago don’t take exception and come round demanding money. Considering that the giant squid is much smaller than the colossal squid, I foresee scientists running frantically to their thesauri to find a suitable superlative if they ever catch a bigger one.

Just so long as they don’t start calling it ‘dinner’.

So, yes, SquidCam. Video conferencing for those of us foolish enough to consort at a distance with Mac users. MSN, in its wisdom, has produced a Mac version which not only appears to be less than stable, but which is also missing the most useful thing about it - voice chat.

(How confusing is it that chat, which used to be something you did on the phone or face-to-face, has now become something that you do on computers by typing and if you want to discuss chat that doesn’t involve typing but does involve speaking and computers and the internet you now have to prepend the word ‘voice’ otherwise people think you mean the typing type of chat and wonder what on earth the problem is because MSN does that perfectly adequately, surely? *takes deep breath*

As an aside to that, I just looked up ‘prepend’ in my Concise OED, and it wasn’t in there, so I got kinda curious as to whether it’s a real word or not. Did a quick search on Google (where else? My reliance on Google is starting to scare me - do I see the world only through googlegoggles? I think that’s a whole nother blog), and sure enough, ‘prepend’ is a word used by programmers to mean ‘add in front of’ which is pretty much what you would think it would be used to mean.

However, the second page I looked at featured an ill-conceived rant by one Clarke F. Echols who has a real bee in his bonnet about the usage of the word ‘prepend’ as an opposite to ‘append’. It is a word, he righteously tells us, that already has a meaning and that meaning is ‘premeditate’. Apparently words aren’t allowed to have more than one meaning.

Right.

We’d better go through the English language with a fine-toothed comb and start thinking up an awful lot of alternatives, then. I mean, I don’t want to start a row (that’s an argument, not a line of something), but I think the precedent has already been set (that is, determined or decided, not a group of objects that belong together) that words can have more than one meaning without confusing everyone. Context is a wonderful thing.

You know, I really can’t stand people who believe that the English language is incapable of evolving and that new words and meanings mustn’t be added to our already richly varied tongue.

I’m such a Pinkerite.)

Now, where was I before I started that little aside? Oh, yes, MSN, and how shit it is if you’re trying to talk to someone on a Mac.

See, the only reason I even use MSN is because all my friends use it. Isn't peer pressure is terrible? But, since becoming an MSN addict, I have been forced to admit that it has its uses, and one of those is saving you lots of money if you want to call abroad. If you have MSN and the person you want to talk to has MSN (plus mic and speakers of course) then you can just use the voice chat option and talk for as long as you like, for free. Good for the phone bill; bad, oh so very, very bad for productivity.

Unless, of course, the person you are trying to talk to has a Mac, in which case you’ll be lucky to get two (typed) words out of them before MSN crashes and obscenities the like of which you can only imagine are growled in the direction of Microbunchofarseholessoft.

Of course, there never can be enough obscenities growled at MS, although it’s a pity that they have no effect.

In an attempt to find a programme that would allow me to voice chat with my Mac-using friend, I downloaded SquidCam, set it up, and tried to get it to work. Which it did after a fashion. I could hear my friend in Australia, he couldn’t hear me. We fiddled with settings. SquidCam cut us off because until you buy the full version you can only use it for a few minutes at a time.

So we reconnected, fiddled with more settings, but still not a peep out of my mic.

"Is it turned on?" J asks.

"Course it is. It doesn’t have an off button," I type into MSN. Truth be told, the one way conversation kinda suits me - I type more coherently than I talk these days, being so cut off from the world as I am. Most of the time the only words I actually utter are ‘Ow’ and ‘Tisha bwyd/mynd allan/rhywbeth i yfed?’ (Do you want something to eat/to go out/something to drink?), all directed at the cat as she sinks her claws in my butt yet again, seeking attention. (And using that tactic, she usually gets it.)

We fiddle with more settings. SquidCam cuts us off again. We resort to MSN for communication and try to figure out what the problem is. I start clicking things at random in the hope that something will work. Eventually I find this little tickbox… It’s under a heading called ‘microphone’ in my volume settings panel...

It says ‘mute’ and it’s ticked.

Oops. Sorry J. Seems you can turn my mic off after all…

Going for a swim in the memepool

2003-05-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

I’m just taking a break from the typesetting to read some stuff online. Yes, I know it’s Saturday, but time waits for no man, or woman for that matter. I must get my new version of the Get Fluent web site finished this weekend so that it’s ready to go live next week when the French worksheet’s been proofed.

Anyway, for ages now I’ve been thinking that this blogging phenomenon is actually quite limited in scope, and that a lot of the main blogs are just all recirculating the same news. Not to criticise them, because I’ve been just as guilty I think, but today my regular online reading matter became very circular.

A couple of days ago Neil Gaiman mentioned that Salam Pax, the now well known blogger from Iraq whose descriptions of Baghdad really make you stop and think very hard indeed, had resumed blogging after having to break because of the war. Preoccupied with my own life as always, this was actually the first I’d heard of Salam, and I went off to check his blog.

If you haven’t read it (which I’m sure you have) then you really must. Salam has an articulate, informed and wry way of writing that is a delight to read. He’s also in a position to tell us stuff about how the invasion of Iraq has affected the lives of everyday people that the media and government would prefer us not to know - they don’t want the Iraqi’s humanised, they want them to be either ‘the enemy’ or ‘pitiful peasants unable to do anything for themselves’.

Anyway, all that aside, Gaiman also mentioned, as I have said previously here, William Gibson (although he didn’t post a link) whose blog I then independently came across after doing a Google search on the phrase ‘why blog’. Later on, the Guardian mentioned Gibson’s blog too. Then Salam Pax’s. Then the BBC mentioned Salam, as does my mate Andy in his blog. Reading Salam’s blog today he mentions William Gibson in passing. Now I’ve just gone to Gibson’s blog and he’s talking about Salam’s blog and what a good writer he is. (Salam that is, not Gibson, although Gibson didn't get to be Gibson without also being a good writer.)

My head is starting to spin.

For ages I’ve noticed how links propagate through the internet, although I’ve never really taken much notice of it. The idea of memes is not new, nor am I particularly well read about it so I can’t really start throwing up insightful comments on the whole thing, but it seems that these memes seem to either be circulating faster, or that there are pools of memes within which the same people constantly paddle.

I find it quite comforting, in a sense, that I am paddling in the same memepool as people that I either already admire or whom I am coming to. I’m not the best connected of people - I do not have enough time to do what needs to be done, let alone trawl the net for juicy tidbits to pass on to you, but it feels good to be getting my ankles wet the same way Gaiman does.

Oh, but before I go...

2003-05-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

I write my blogs in Word (oh gods, please forgive me my sins). I spellcheck them. I read them over several times. Then I cut and paste and post.

Why do I never spot the typos until I've published them to Blog*Spot?

I give up on deep and meaningful posts

2003-05-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

I don’t know whether it’s something to do with Mercury being retrograde at the moment. Or maybe the internet’s feng shui is bad - possibly someone put an NT server in the communications corner and screwed it up. Perhaps it’s that I haven’t performed the correct ritual sacrifice of a sweet, innocent virgin cable modem recently. But whenever I have come to write my blog recently, I seem to have been incapable of actually finishing any thoughts.

I have lots of them when I'm busy doing other stuff, but when I sit down to write something, they all scarper like fleet-footed thieves through the alleyways of Manchester that the city council so desperately want to close off.

I still don't understand why the ramblers are so against the gating of these dark, dingy, litter-strewn passageways that lead to precisely nowhere that the road wouldn't also take you if you walked just that little bit further. It's hardly a right of way issue, and much more of a cutting down on people's houses getting broken into from the back by a surreptitious beshellsuited tosser with a ladder issue.

I remember reading once that your iq increases if you stand on one foot. There's something about the way your brain reacts to balancing that seems to wake up your synapses and makes them work more efficiently. (Frankly, in my case, if they worked at all it would be a miracle.)

When I found out about this, I wondered if this was why I am always more creative when I'm walking. On any random stroll to Tescos up the river I will likely have more coherent thoughts than I would spending double the amount of time sitting here staring at this monitor. I have, therefore, been considering for some time now the idea of rigging up a computer in front of a treadmill so that I can both be more creative and get more exercise. Two birds, one stone - genius.

I know I've mentioned this before on this blog, but I am also far more creative shortly after I've gone to bed. You know that time, in between your head hitting the pillow and you actually falling asleep, that's when I have my ideas. I'm not sure if it's something to do with the way your brain starts to prepare for entry into the hypnogogic state which presages sleep that it naturally kinda kicks into imaginative mode.

I'm forever having thoughts, then having to turn the light on and write them down before they escape me. How much better would it be if there was some way to capture that more efficiently. I considered rigging up a wee little laptop or palmtop with a keyboard on a swivelling tilting platform thingie so that I could just kinda pull it down, type stuff in, and push it back out the way again, thus saving the need to actually either a) turn the light on or b) wake up.

I have long since learnt to get up to let the cat in at 2am without appreciably waking up so if I could only learn to write in my sleep then my novel would get done an awful lot faster. (Mind you, ‘faster’ would not be difficult to achieve, since my current output on that front has been a big fat zilch recently. Stress and having your own business are real killers insofar as novels go.)

Yes, so here I am again, towards the end of an entry, desperately searching for some sort of conclusion to wrap things up with and so very definitely not finding one. Maybe it’s the scientist in me that insists on having some nice, tidy end to everything I ever write, something to just round it all off. Something that will stick in your mind, as reader, and make you feel that this was a blog well blogged.

Ah fuck it. I’m off to watch Buffy.

Comments

2003-05-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've added the facility to post comments now. I don't expect to get any, but the option's there if you want it.

Ahh, Friday afternoons...

2003-05-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

A Pimms and lemonade in my hand, perfectly complementing the summery blue sky outside... the phutphutphut of narrow boats chugging somnolently up the Kennet... the soft swish of my brain cells as they drain out through my ears whilst I contemplate a weekend spent chained to my darling computer... and the gentle yearning for a leisurely punt on (or near, I'm not fussy) the Thames with my dearly beloved (who is busy living it up on the other side of the world as I type)...

What's going on?

2003-05-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

I've never been a morning person, so I'd dearly like to know why I keep waking up at 6am and, (and this is the freaky bit) actually getting up. When I first started on this self-unemployment thing about six years ago, you'd be lucky to see me out of bed during the hours of daylight at all, but recently I've been up with the larks and actually enjoying it.

I wonder if there's some sort of gene that doesn't get expressed until you hit 30, but which eventually results in your pineal gland going into overdrive at even the slightest chink of light. I'm also suffering from a bizarre feeling of smugness every time I prise my sorry arse from the bedsheets before 7am, as if I have somehow managed to achieve something worthwhile.

On the other hand, (no pun intended, honestly) I'm very glad that I'm not in the position of having to cut my own arm off in order to cheat death as did Aron Ralston when he was pinned down by a boulder in a climbing accident. I can't imagine (especially at this hour) how horrendous that must be, although to be honest, I'm not really trying that hard.

The weblit bonanza

2003-05-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

Well, The Guardian is busy keeping up its journalistic standards by telling us that the web has not, contrary to earlier rumours, taken literature off into the woods and wrung its scrawny neck but is, in fact, helping the dying art form cling to life by providing us rich middleclass westerners with computers the opportunity to access an amazingly large corpus of free stuff to read which we could obviously never have afforded to buy for ourselves.

There appears to be an underlying assumption that more is better. That the mere availability of lots of words on the internet is a Good Thing and should be Encouraged:

Sites such as Zoetrope, the Short Story Group and, while offering no critique, sites such as ABCTales, will publish anyone who wants to show their work to the world.

But is everyone who has work to show of to the world producing something that the world wants to read? I would hazard, perhaps not. The publishing process may be full of holes you could fit the Titanic through, relying as it does on people’s occasionally iffy opinions, but at least there is someone else other than the author in the loop. Someone else to give feedback and suggest improvements and amendments. I don’t personally believe that there is an author on this planet who would not benefit from the assistance of a good editor.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every book being published now has had the benefit of a good editor. Take Flood, by Richard Doyle. Now there’s a book that’s a compelling read, a real page-turner, positively gripping. It manages to be all these things, however, despite being really very badly written in places. And way, way too long.

Flood’s strength is that we all love a good disaster, and Doyle has obviously put a huge amount of work into researching the scenario of a major London flood. You just know when you read about the way that the Thames Barrier works, that it really does work like that. The book creates a cohesive reality in which you can immerse yourself without having your bubble pricked by contradictory information.

Instead your bubble is pricked by some really godawful prose that frankly should never have made it into print. If Flood had been given a really good going over by someone willing to question why certain scenes were included and to chop say, oh, about a quarter of the text (or failing that, every fourth word), maybe it would have been a bloody great book, instead of just a ‘gripping’ book.

I’ve not been in the publishing industry for a good few years now, but I’ve been getting the feeling that there is less and less good editing going on, and more and more of a demand for camera ready copy (although I bet it’s not called that anymore!) direct from the author. Add that trend to the immediacy and availability of web publishing and you have great potential for quality to go into freefall.

This is not to say that I think that all literature or literary endeavours on the net are steaming piles of rancid dog poo. I love Neil Gaiman’s blog and (this name I stumbled across for the third time in two days in that Guardian piece… someone’s trying to tell me something) William Gibson’s blog, to mention just two. I’m also sure that there are some fantastic undiscovered authors *coughcough* out there, publishing on the net in e-book, blog or other form, some excellent work. But I just can’t handle wading through the ankledeep shite to find it.

Perversely - of course, because I am the Electric Monk incarnate - these concerns do not mean that I hold anything against the flourishing weblit phenomenon. I see it in much the same way as I see the swapping of mp3s on SoulSeek or any other p2p network - if people get a taster of Gaiman’s abilities from his blog, and that makes them pop out to pick up a copy of Coraline that they would not otherwise have bought, then that has to be a good thing. I just wish that there were a literary version of SoulSeek to facilitate this process.

You’re probably wondering why I don’t find myself some reliable litcrit rag and go by that, but I’ve always hated reviews and reviewers - I have never found one that I agree with, so I just don’t trust their judgement. Which leaves me with two options - personal recommendation or accidentally stumbling over something good whilst looking for something completely different. And I suspect I’m not alone in that. Theoretically this would be where litblogs come in, but then you have that whole trust issue coming up again.

I’d love to have a conclusion to this, but I disconcertingly find that I don’t. I also am not now going to go on about how I’m not convinced that making more literature available for free to people with computers is actually going to result in the people who could really benefit from free literature getting anything out of it at all. There’s a whole discussion there about demographics and the lack of overlap between certain sections of our society that is a whole nother hour’s worth of thought.

However, as an end note I would like to tell you that I have made progress today on the internet detox. I have taken a whole new tactic: instead of trying to purge myself of the desire to post on SA, I’m trying to purge myself of the guilt of posting on SA. So far, this is working particularly well. I posted for several hours this morning and felt no guilt whatsoever.

I'll never be clean

2003-05-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

Ah, you can trust a truly shitty day to drive you back to the comfort and warmth of the internet. I guess once an addict, always an addict.

I just stuck ‘why blog’ into Google and it came up with William Gibson’s blog, notable because only today did I see Gibson’s name mentioned in Neil Gaiman’s blog. I’d never heard of Gibson before (oh, mea culpa, I’m so uninformed), so I was tempted enough by this coincidence to check it out. It makes good reading. I think his blog might even become a daily destination for me.

I also found Joho the blog, which endeared itself to me immediately upon the discovery of this passage, actually quoted from Jonathan Peterson. (I can’t find the exact words myself, but they are allegedly in there somewhere.)

[there are] tremendous isolationist pressures on individuals, anything that can lessen those pressures by enabling real, emotional, human, re-connection will thrive.

Hey, now I don’t feel so bad about running back to Sweet Addy at the first sign of stress.

Cold turkey

2003-05-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

My head is a seething morass of thoughts today, each one writhing against the next like a ball of herring desperately trying to escape the tuna fish herding them up to the surface of the sea to ensure that each and every one becomes lunch.

I’m going cold turkey. That’s it. My addiction (or should that be, addyction) to Sweet Addy and MSN has got way too out of hand, and I appear to be absolutely incapable of simply cutting back. It’s like that idea that you can quit smoking or drinking by ‘just cutting down’ - it’s all very well in theory but in practice it’s very difficult to draw the line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much’.

So it is with my pals online - there’s no such thing as a ‘quick chat’ online. I have been known in recent days to have MSN conversations that have gone on for six or eight hours. Admittedly MSN chats tend to be a lot slower than normal ones - we probably could have said the same in half an hour on the phone. But I can touch type, which means that the limiting factor in the speed of the conversation is the typing speed of the other party. If they type slowly, then I can pretend to myself that I’m getting work done in between my contributions. If they type as fast as I do, then that pretence becomes less and less believable.

I’ve been online since 1994, one way or another. I remember when Yahoo chat was full of adults discussing books and literature, rather than 13 year olds pretending to cyber. I remember when a 28k connection seemed to be going like shit off a stick. I remember when web sites never had graphics.

I’ve used the internet for communication, research, work and fun for eight or nine years. I’ve depended on it for work for the last five. But this is the worst my addiction has become, because only now is it interfering with my life in a negative way (i.e. I’m playing online when I should be working). The internet has variously been my mentor, my saviour and my reliable ol’ mate throughout that time, but now it’s really doing my head in.

Faced with this question now, of whether I really am an internet addict, I did what any sensible person would do. I went to Google and searched for information. (Strike one…)

This means that I’m not in bed when told myself I would be (strike two…), and that my intention to get an early night so that I could get an early morning so that I can catch up on all the things that I should have done today but didn’t do because I was too busy chatting to my Australian friends has really bitten the dust. (Strike two-and-a-half…)

It’s clear that the internet is not addictive in the way that, say, heroin is addictive. If it is addictive, then it’s a behavioural addiction, not physiological, but many psychologists just don’t believe it’s real at all. But if in fact addicts "use the Internet excessively as a medium to fuel other addictions... The Internet is just the place where they engage in their behaviour" (Griffths, 2000), then what the hell am I addicted to? Talking?

Actually, that’s not so far from the truth really. I’m a compulsive communicator. I’m afraid that I have the confessional gene, and talking is something I’m rather well known for in the real world. Or should I say, talking too much. But you know, that’s not my fault - if you’d been brought up with my Mum you’d also have learnt that the only way to say everything you needed to say is to not draw breath between paragraphs. And never pause. A pause in our household was always fatal.

It’s a miracle that I ever learnt to punctuate.

However, much of the stuff on internet addiction that I’ve been reading whilst writing this blog seems to be somewhat concerned with cybering, rather than taking an overall look at how excessive internet usage affects people’s lives. Yet there’s a lot more to internet usage than cybering.

And this brings me onto a tangential bugbear that I can’t let pass.

What is wrong with the good old fashioned epistolary relationship, as was once common, facilitated by email and MSN? Huh? Not every friendship or relationship formed online is fake, shallow and lacking in merit. I met a couple of my very dear friends online and our relationships offline are no different to the ones we have online. I also know many couples who have met online and are living perfectly well together offline.

Yet so many people who have no experience of what could tongue-twistingly be called an e-epistolary relationship will immediately dismiss them as ‘unreal’, as if the internet itself is in some way fake. It’s not. There are real people out there, and they are no more likely to be a mad axe murderer than any guy who’s ever chatted me up in a pub. In fact, I would rather get to know someone slowly over a number of months via the internet than get utterly shitfaced in some skanky London bar and hope that my judgement’s not so clouded that I’ll have to gnaw my own arm off in the morning in order to effect an escape. (Don’t laugh. I’m typing one-handed right now, you know.)

Anyway, back to the point. Internet addiction. I’m not going to list the various signs and signals listed on the sites I’ve looked at, nor am I going to link to them, mainly because I happen to tick ‘yes’ to a rather scary proportion of them. (Secrecy regarding online activities? Strike two-and-three-quarters…)

But I have concluded that I’m not actually addicted. Not really. I just need a break and to concentrate on the important things in life, like making sure my business flourishes. (Or at least goes out with a flourish, if nothing else…)

Denial? Strike three! You’re out!

The City, here I come!

2003-05-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

I would like to know if anyone’s got a formula for calculating the Doppler shift on fast receding deadlines. I’m pretty sure that there must be one, as you can hear that kinda funny pitch-shifting whining sound they make as they go past.

Equally, there must be a formula for the apparent speed with which holidays fail to approach.

Yesterday, I booked a return ticket to San Francisco (a place that I frequently have difficulty spelling) for July. Now, the momentousness of this event is something which I don’t think many people reading this will be able to appreciate. This isn’t just a holiday. This isn’t just an opportunity to go to new places, meet up with new people and generally have a spiffing good time. This isn’t just a chance to get away from the dreariness of Reading, or for two weeks to put aside my stresses and worries about my beautiful business.

No.

This is much, much more important than that.

This is my first holiday, my first actual leaving the country holiday involving fun and relaxing and sunshine and generally having a good time, for some 13 years. Yup. Thirteen. Count ‘em. Last time I went a-gallivanting was in 1990 when I spent a deliriously fabulous nine months in Australia, delighting in the discovery that one could earn money and then actually spend it!!

When I was up at the Groucho Club in March for the St David’s Day SWS party, I was accused by a complete stranger of being a workaholic, a charge I hotly (but somewhat ineffectively) denied. However, in having to defend myself against these charges I was forced to examine exactly why I haven’t been on holiday for 13 years. I mean, it’s not like my nose has been chained to its inner grindstone for all that time.

Strictly speaking, I actually have had holidays, i.e. I’ve had time off work. (When I’ve had that kind of work, that is. Being self-unemployed as I have been for the last six years does not really lend itself to holidays, just periods of inactivity and brokeness followed by flurries of work and the paying off of the credit cards you lived off when you were broke. My life has been one constant cashflow crisis - I haven’t had any, and it hasn’t.) I just seem to have spent that time off either faffing about my house/flat/small cardboard box, or going back to Dorset and putting in kitchens. Or bathrooms. Or windows.

I suppose I could easily have just booked myself a holiday, but I’ve always found other things to spend my money on. New computers. New guitars. New amps. More new guitars. Another new amp…

I see pattern emerging there.

Thing is, it’s not like I’m exactly flush with cash right now. In fact, I’m contemplating flogging some of the spare guitars and amps that I have littered around the place as they do nothing bit sit about and gather dust. Two of the basses I can’t play because they’re too heavy - the Precision and the Aria. The Hohner acoustic I can’t play because it’s right-handed and I play left-handed these days. The Bass State B65 I no longer use as I don’t play in a band any more and, frankly, I can’t see myself playing in a band again any time soon. So I may as well flog them and, given the state of my bank account, the sooner the better.

Anyway, so yes, holidays. And the speed with which they fail to approach. I remember that only a week ago, my holiday was 82 days away. Now it’s… :consults calendar: 75 days away. Yet it doesn’t appear to be appreciably closer. I mean, a whole week went past and nothing happened.

It’s like standing on the platform at Reading station waiting for the next fast to London, and you can see the headlights in the distance, but you stand and stare and stand and stare and they don’t get any bigger and so you stand and stare for a bit longer.

Then they tell you that there’s a signal failure outside the station and that you’ll have to wait at least another half an hour, and you realise that the reason that the train never got any bigger was because it was stopped.

I hope I don’t have that problem with my holiday. With any luck, it will be just like those spanky new Virgin trains. You can hear the track singing with anticipation, making that whispery metallic whipping sound as the train gets closer and you look up and suddenly what was only moments ago a little red speck in the distance is pulling in at the platform in front of you, ready to whisk you off to somewhere new and exciting.

Or Crewe.

Hopefully, though, my holiday will have a bit more legroom.

Organica

2003-05-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

Here's that Organica page that wasn't working the other day. I notice that neither Organica nor Ecosystems are 100% accurate, though. I actually have four links into this blog, not three. And when you're talking about such small numbers, a difference of one is important!

Ha ha ha!! Fame at last!

2003-05-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

I've just had a bit of an influx of emails after PopBitch included the CMC swearing in Welsh cheat sheet in its weekly email. If you get it, scroll right down to the very, very bottom to find:

Still bored?
Learn how to swear in Welsh:
http://www.clwbmalucachu.co.uk/cheat/cheat_swearing.htm

Fame! Fame at last! Ffycin ffantastig! Ah, I feel like all these years of effort and slogging away over a hot dictionary are finally paying off.

Hmm... spose I better subscribe to PopBitch now really, hadn't I?

I never was good at networking

2003-04-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Whilst looking for something completely different the other night, I came across a couple of sites that provide link stats for blogs. Ecosystems gives lists of the links out of and into Choc’n’Vodka, but picks up only the menu links. Organica (which today fails to work, hence no link) on the other hand appears to be a bit more comprehensive, picking up all the links in all of the archives for its outgoing list.

Whilst the concept of knowing who has linked to me is great, the reality of it is a bit pathetic really. Both links into Choc’n’Vodka are from people I know - so it seems I shall remain an undiscovered blogging phenomenon for a while yet.

Whilst shuffling though the bevvie of links that those two sites threw up, I also found BlogStreet Visual Neighbourhood, which basically finds blogs it thinks are similar to yours and lays them out in a sort of mindmap. A lot of the blogs were obvious - Bratiaith and Rwdls Nwdls, for example, I already know about and link to, if only cos they’re Welsh. But I did find #!/user/bin/girl and, via that, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, both of which were amusing diversions from this afternoon’s tasks at hand.

One thing I would like to know, though, is how many people read this blog. I know some of my friends do, because occasionally I’ll start some witty and erudite comment only for them to say ‘Yes, I read that on your blog’. So far so good - the people I’m writing for are reading and that makes me a happy bunny.

But I have suspected for sometime that the number of people who actually read blogs is considerably less the number of people writing them. Come on, we’ve all gone to Weblogs.com or somesuch, just to check if we’re on the list, but how many of those blogs do we actually read? Well I’m way too busy simultaneously carrying out three conversations on MSN, slapping scores of witty ripostes up on Sweet Addy in order to keep my postcount healthy, and replying to emails to do any work, let alone read any blogs.

My suspicion that blog readers are few and far between seemed to be confirmed when I was skimming this article on The Register. Although it’s actually about the Googlewashing of the phrase ‘secondary superpower’ (no, I didn’t know about Googlewashing either, but I’ll take The Register’s word for it), one bit stood out:

Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is "so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs."

Further exploration of Pew Research Center’s latest research fails to throw up an actual figure for the number of blog users, other than "4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions". A quick bit of maths based on PRC’s assertion that there are 116 million Americans online indicates 4.6 million Americans ‘use’ blogs (there’s no distinction made between reading and writing).

This leaves me wondering. 4.6 million blog users in American alone isn’t exactly a small number of people, no matter how statistically insignificant it might be in the grand scheme of things. So does this mean that there are 4.6 million blogs in America? (Cue: sudden and unexplained Kim Wilde flashback.) Maybe I’m wrong in my assumption that no one reads blogs. Maybe that’s just me. After all, I’m too lazy to learn the word for ‘lazy’ in Welsh.

Anyway, this leaves me at the end here trying to figure out what on earth my point was in all that. I think it’s got something to do with the words ‘million’ and ‘two’ and the disparity between them. Come on guys, link to me!

Electricity - you don't miss it til it's gone

2003-04-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Where are we? Oh yes, Tuesday. That’s right. I’m all kinda thrown because Sunday, usually a day of surreptitious shopping and pretending to be working, miraculously turned into a day of rest. Yes, that’s right, sitting down somewhere that was not in front of a computer.

By the time Fflwff had dragged me out of bed, the electricity had gone off, and it didn’t come back again until 7pm. Initially, I was at a loss. What would I do? I’d have a nice shower… Oh no, can’t. Um, OK, bath instead. Then I thought I’d kill some time until I could get on the internet by doing something constructive, like ironing. Oh, wait, that’s out too. Well, I really do need to dyson the flat… OK, starting to see a pattern here.

I must admit, I had started to feel a bit twitchy by lunchtime, and actually ended up leaving the house and going to Tescos, where they had electricity but no internet. I had hoped that this masterstroke of timekilling strategy would end with me returning home, laden with goodies, only to find the electricity back and my computer ready and waiting to go online.

It didn’t.

So I faffed.

I rang people I haven’t spoken to in years.

I rang people I’d spoken to last week.

I rediscovered the lost art of reading, devouring most of the New Scientist in one hit. (It lands on my mat every Thursday, and I never have time to read it all. Plus I have several months worth of Scientific American still untouched by human hands).

I fed the cat. Several times. I played with the cat. I let the cat out. I let the cat back in again.

I stared at the heaps of paperwork on my desk and contemplated sorting them out, but found that particular activity quite easy to resist.

I opened the front door and wandered round the garden, killing approximately 28 seconds. (It’s a small garden.)

I flicked through the guide book to South Australia that I bought on Saturday.

I kicked myself for going into town to buy a guide book to South Australia on Saturday instead working because I had assumed I could do it on Sunday.

I kept thinking, oh, well, spare time, I’ll just put the TV on…

The silence was positively deafening.

Obviously I wasn’t the only one faffing, as mid-afternoon, two fire engines came screaming into the close, only to park up and sit bemusedly for five minutes before screaming off into the far distance again. I suspect little Johnny downstream was bored and thought that calling 999 would be a fun jape.

Then… suddenly and without warning, the lounge light came on at about 6.30pm and scared the bejeesus out of me. I’m not quite sure about the mechanism for that - how can something you’re expecting to happen any minute still make you jump? I get that with phone calls, when you ring someone up and they do the ‘Oh, I’ll call you back in a moment’ thing and you put the phone down and a few moments later they ring back and I leap out of my chair like some evil dead zombie dripping blood and gore has just materialised in front of me.

Um, anyway, yes, the lights came back on. And then went off again. And came back on again… For about 10 minutes. I think someone was trying to communicate something really very important in Morse, but unfortunately the only Morse I have is the beebs and bips at the beginning of Barrington Pheloung’s Inspector Morse theme tune, which I could sing to you but not translate.

I prefer to think that it was Douglas Adams telling me that he was right about 42, and forget about the towels.

The thing that surprised me though, apart from the sudden brightness, was how noisy my house is. My cordless phone was bleating like an orphaned lamb, the microwave tooted, the fridge and freezer started humming, the thermostat was clicking like an old granny going for the World Speed Knitting record and the video started whirring like, well a whirry thing.

I think I preferred it when it was quiet.

So, I had my internet and email back, the thing I’d been craving all day, the thing whose absence had caused me jitters and chronic withdrawal anxiety, and guess what? No emails. No private messages. And sweet fanny adams in terms of anything interesting online whatsoever. All that waiting for precisely nothing.

When they launch the Twelve Steps for Internet Dependency, I’m gonna be there. But don't worry. I'll blog about it.

Oops

2003-04-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

I've just read over my last few blogs. I seem a teensy bit stressed, don't I? Hm, I'll have to do something about that.

It's just one of those weeks

2003-04-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

These are some of the first coherent thoughts to form in my head all day which don’t involve the phrases ‘but it hurts’ or ‘am I going to throw up?’. I spent most of the morning holding my head on with one hand as my migraine blossomed. I’m lucky, I only get them about once or twice a year and usually they don’t involve pain and vomiting - they’re what are called ‘aura only’ migraines, i.e. I just go blind for an hour or so, and then it all clears up and goes away.

Today, for some reason, my migraine started in my right eye (usually it’s my left) and then the pain kinda roved across my face like a tribe of nomads, then up over the left-hand part of my head which I had to then cling on to in order to prevent it from dropping off. I never can figure out why I have to do this, but every time I get a bad headache, I just have to clutch at my head like a crone going after a rat.

After several hours of laying a-bed and not vomiting (quite an achievement, I felt), I finally managed to get one of my icepacks and apply it appropriately.

Which always begs the question - which part of the body is it, exactly, for which these icepacks are designed? They’re long, they’re flat and they don’t bend well. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m mainly built of curves - flat planes are few and far between on me, especially in the head/neck/shoulder area to which these ice pack are usually applied.

Why not make these things curvy and flexible? In fact, why not make them head-shaped or scarf-ishly bendable? That way I would be saved from a) having to wrap the icepack in a thin towel (ok, a teatowel) in order to tie it round my neck or b) trying to sit bolt upright and balancing the thing on my head. To make them as hats, or scarves, would be much more user friendly.

My other quibble is the ignorance of certain doctors as regards the medical issues surrounding migraines. One in ten people get migraines. That’s 10% of the population. That’s six million people, for any doctors reading this who are too stupid to add up.

That’s a lot of people.

Last November I had a rough weekend which featured two migraines and the arrival of a new symptom for me - my skin went numb. Naturally, not being then as well read about migraines as I am now, I decided it would be wise to get it checked out as it’s not every day I lose feeling in my skin. I was struck, however, by the total absence of knowledge displayed by my supposedly well informed doctor. Our conversation went something like:

"I had two migraines over the weekend."

"Huh."

"Well, I don’t normally get two together."

"Huh."

"They were just aura migraines though, but now I can’t feel my face properly."

"Huh?"

"Or my arms, or my legs. Or, in fact, any bit of me."

"Huh."

"Although there is a sort of strange tingliness to the numbness."

"Huh."

"So…"

"Well, if it doesn’t clear up in a week, come back to me."

And this is what I pay my taxes for? So some jumped-up arrogant jerk can patronise me and fob me off with some pointless platitude in order to cover up her own ignorance? I mean, it’s not like I’m expecting her to wave a magic wand and cure me, but a bit of info would be nice. Instead, I went home and looked it up on the internet, which is what I should have done in the first place, and found out that such symptoms can occur, and are relatively normal and will in fact go away eventually (5 days in my case).

The quack could have told me that though, but she didn’t know. Hell, from the expression on her face it was perfectly clear she had no idea what ‘aura’ was either (that’s the visual disturbances you get as a migraine starts - the flashing lights etc. that essentially stop you seeing a damn thing).

But I do believe that everyone, especially that particular doctor, should have at least one storming migraine, so that they can understand what they are like and how crippling they can be. I would dearly like for her to have one like my first, when I was sixteen. One that involves going almost completely blind, not being able to see your hand in front of your face, not being able to walk through your house because you keep bumping into things that you can’t see. One that involves vomiting chocolate cake down the stairs in a somewhat unpleasant waterfall (vomitfall?), retching so hard that your eyes go black with the prickling bruises of broken blood vessels. One that involves curling up foetally under the duvet in a blacked-out room, unable to cry with pain because there’s too much of it, but able, just, to whimper plaintively "Bring me some painkillers."

To which I would, of course, reply: "Huh?"

Anyway, that shagged my whole day really. So tomorrow is catch-up day. It would be nice to have a good clean start - put this whole week behind me. Not that nice things haven’t happened this week - I have had a few particularly pleasant experiences such as a phone call to Australia that I shall be grinning about for weeks to come yet. But it has been a frustrating week full of not really getting down to work in any serious manner, not really making the progress I would have liked to have made considering the amount of work to be done.

So I think I might redesignate today the official end of the week, which means that Saturday is now essentially Monday so if I work tomorrow I’ll have Tuesday off which will be Sunday and then next weekend start with Saturday on Thursday unfortunately meaning that I will need Monday and Tuesday off on Saturday and Sunday so I can have the weekend free to go to Dorset.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863)

2003-04-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

I got side-tracked this evening. I was going to write a long and impressive rant about why I despise the reprehensible stealth tax that is the national lottery. Instead, I'm going to bring you Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863) (via Neil Gaiman's blog. Again. See, I don't have time to surf much these days!), and leave it pretty much at that I think. Maybe tomorrow...

A morning too early

2003-04-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

I've just realised that I've been sitting at this computer solidly for twelve hours now. No wonder I feel like seven shades of shite.

I really don't know what came over me this morning, but at 5.50am I woke up. Not in that 'ooh, I'll just turn over and go back to sleep’ way, but in that kind of over-alert, over-awake way where after a few minutes of trying to get back to sleep you realise the futility of it all, and just get up. You know how it is, when the sunlight’s seeped through your skull and your pineal gland is screaming for breakfast.

So I got up and did 45 mins of Pilates which resulted in a strained muscle (that’s good! I wasn’t aware I had any!) and a feeling of virtuousness that lasted till, oh, as soon as I turned MSN on at about 12.30.

Anyway, I was surfing by 6.45am, and working by 7.45am. And I’m really not sure why…

Now then... where's that canopic jar?

Circuit and bumps

2003-04-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

I think you know the feeling - that one where you wake up and realise that at some point during the night an ancient Egyptian embalmer has been at your brains with a small hook, fishing them out through your nose and storing them in some sort of pandimensional canopic that jar he knows you'll never find. You then spend all day feeling somewhat dessicated and waiting for Anubis to pop round with a pair of balances and a feather that has antigravitational properties.

I am almost certainly mixing up my Egyptian gods here, but you get the point.

Circuit and bumps... that's what Fflwff did all night last night. That's what they call it when you're learning how to land planes and take off. You take off, fly round in a loop - that's the circuit - then you land and immediately take off again - that's the bump. Now, imagine that the sky is in fact the windowsill next to my bed, my head is the landing strip, and Fflwff is the plane. All sodding night... jump off the windowsill onto my head, walk down the left hand side of the bed, across over my feet, up the right hand side, sit for a moment with her tail draped fetchingly across my face, then it's back round and back on to the windowsill and read for another go.

Then Cleo decided to come and check me out, make sure that I was actually the person I said I was. Before I had Fflwff, Cleo would turncoat and sleep on my bed overnight whenever I was home. She still can't resist coming to say hello at 2am, usually butting me under the chin quite violently with her forehead. She draws blood this way, as your teeth slam together catching your tongue inbetween. It's her way of telling you she loves you.

Trouble is, Cleo's none too subtle, and more than once there has been an unscheduled meeting of cats, resulting in the feline equivalent of hydrogen fusion - a bloody great big noise and a ferocious explosion of teeth, fur and claws, usually right over my head. Thankfully I was saved from that particular eventuality last night, but there's every chance I'll get to enjoy it tonight instead.

Anyway... I'm going to go and dig the bread dough out of my rings now, then I'm going to sit comatose in front of the TV until I can legitimately retire to bed. Intelligent blogging may return, oh, possibly next year. Depends on when I find that damn canopic jar.

I'd've posted this last night if the computer had let me

2003-04-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

Well, my work ethic has come back to haunt me. Here I am, sitting in my parents’ lounge, looking out on a gloriously sunny spring afternoon, with a heap of work to do (despite the fact that it’s a bank holiday and frankly I shouldn’t be doing anything) but absolutely no inclination to do it at all. I made a half hearted start on the indexing of the Get Fluent worksheets so far, then went for a walk round the garden instead.

As usual, Fflwff has located the highest defensible position in the house - on top of the wardrobe in the spare room - and is ready to see off all comers. In practice, this usually just means me. Cleo and Rossy, my parents' cats, never actually look up so the chances are that the entire weekend will pass without them realising that Fflwff is even here. I’ll feed her on top of the wardrobe, and she’ll pop down in the middle of the night to make use of the kitty litter, and then it’ll be time to go home.*

Cleo, however, is treating me with a great deal of suspicion, as she always does. We have already played games of Cat and Human, which is like Cat and Mouse except the aim is for the Human to hug the Cat, despite the Cat’s wish to be left alone to watch with interest the small brown birds frequenting the all-you-can-eat peanut buffet. I got my hug, but at the price of two small puncture wounds and a very pissed-off cat.

Latest web thing is the Honda ‘Cog’ advert, (via Neil Gaiman's blog) which was shot in one go, on the 606th take. There’s been much discussion about how they managed it on SA. Consensus is (i.e. my dad said) that the bit with the wheels going up the slope was done using weights and small motors within the wheel. Still however it was done, it’s viral marketing at it’s best. (Although I hasten to add that this ad had done nothing to persuade me to buy a car, let a lone a Honda. Frankly, I’m still far too terrified of driving to even think about buying a car.)

*Due to Fflwff's last moment relocation to the office and the fact that whenever possible Cleo prefers to hide under the desk that Fflwff likes to sit on, it has now become abundantly clear that Cleo and Fflwff are very much aware of each other's presence. In fact, I was starting to worry that Fflwff had not only sprung a leak but was in danger of depressurising completely, the amount of hissing she was doing.

just a little fix... please?

2003-04-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

oh dear it seems that
this haiku thing is catching
oh five seven five

sweet addyct am i
i talked crap all afternoon
both there and on chat

the fiery sun sets
but i must apply myself
always catching up

The New Improved Sucky Haiku Thread!

2003-04-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

The New Improved Sucky Haiku Thread!

I do believe this
to be the way forward for
communication

Happy Birthday to me!

2003-04-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

Ever tried writing in Welsh after nothing more than half a panini for lunch and far too many Pimms? It gets really tricky after a while. My ‘rhag ofn’s were getting all confused with my ‘rhagor’s. Or maybe it’s just me. Feck, that’s what my translator is for, to fix my typos.

Still, today has been a good day, as birthdays go. People didn’t forget, which is always nice. I had a phone call from my parents who are off gallivanting in Lanzarote. I thought they might call, but they caught me off guard by doing it twelve hours earlier than I expected. Rotters.

I also got four of the CDs I’ve been craving ownership of

- Aqualung’s Aqualung: Matt Hales’s sweet heartbroken voice could make an angel weep
- The Libertines’ Up the Bracket: featuring the best ‘fuck ‘em’ in modern music.
- The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World: James Mercer’s surreal lyrics and pop sensibilities make this a truly wondrous album
- Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown: to say that Hot Hot Heat are Very Very Good, is somewhat of an understatement

I am also now the very proud and excited owner of the Pleasantville DVD. Number Six! Oh yes!! Tonight, once I’ve had my gourmet pasta and the first strawberries and clotted cream of the year, I shall rearrange my furniture in that ritualistic manner to which I have become accustomed, and I shall allow myself to be totally spirited away. I read the script a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been yearning to see the flick ever since. It was a great read - just came to life immediately in my head as I read, in stark contrast to, say, The Ice Storm at the end of which I was left thinking ‘Eh?’.

It’s been unseasonably hot today as well, and I feel with the very moment of my birth rapidly approaching (about 10pm-ish, apparently) that this coming year will be one of huge opportunities, including the chance to tip my life upside down, shake it a bit, and see what interesting things fall out. I haven’t done that for a while, and a birthday is a good opportunity being, as it is, the anniversary of one’s very first Big Shake Up.

This day 32 years ago, in The Firs Maternity Home in Bournemouth, the midwife wrapped a squalling me in a blanket, handed me to my mother and said, ‘Mrs Charman, a beautiful baby girl’. To which my mother replied, ‘Are you sure?’.

Apparently, they’d been expecting a boy, as boys ‘run in the family’. True enough, my brother’s a boy, and so’s my dad. Anyway, they were going to call me Mark, and they had boy’s clothing ready for me, so when I turned up, three weeks early and the wrong gender, my dad had to make a dash for the shops to buy something pink.

Pity they didn’t know at that time that I hate pink. But then, I didn’t know at that time either, so I guess it was a moot point.

Birthdays are good for nice surprises. And I’ve had several today, one of which was quite astonishing. My friend Kate and I had been lamenting only this afternoon about the fact that neither of us had heard in a long time from our American friend JD in a year or more. And what should pop up in my inbox this afternoon but an email from the very same! How’s that for coincidence?

Anyway… I think may be rambling a little, and it’s time for my weekly phone call to Nic so that I can practise my spoken Welsh, so I shall post this, and let you go. But not before I say thank you for the happy birthday to everyone who emailed, PM’d, posted and sent me stuff. You’re all adorable!

time for a quick rant, er, I mean blog…

2003-04-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today has been one of those days. I woke at 12.45am with this amazingly loud ringing in my left ear, as if a tuning fork had suddenly materialised in my Eustachian tube. Two hours of laying there trying to back to sleep later and I figured out that I may as well get up and do something useful. So I spent a happy hour or so typesetting until my eyelids were resting on the keyboard. I got back to bed about 3.45am ish.

Hence today has been a vacant day. Mondays are bad at the best of times, just because of the way my week works. Mondays I write the Welsh language worksheet that’s to go out the following week to Get Fluent! subscribers. Sometimes they come out easily, sometimes I find that I would rather be retching my guts up into toilet bowl than be sat in front of this computer writing grammar exercises and reading comprehensions.

Today, I would rather have gnawed my own leg off than try to tackle writing a worksheet. I think I actually spent more time reading Neil Gaiman’s blog and playing on Sweet Addy than I did doing any actual work. I think I got maybe a third of the worksheet done, which pisses me off mightily, because I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday working in order that today I might gain some ground and therefore be able to take tomorrow off. Well, I shouldn’t have bothered because any time I made up yesterday I lost today.

Which means tomorrow morning, the first thing I have to do, after I’ve opened the alluringly mysterious CD-sized packages that have lit upon my doormat over the last few days, is finish that damn worksheet.

Arse.

Not a truer word said

2003-04-14T04:56:00.000-07:00

Paul Carr on the demise of Salon.com, from The Guardian Online:

"I feel really sorry for anyone trying to raise funds to launch a subscription-based website in the current climate - it would be easier to get funding for a new pan-European fashion retail brand led by two Swedish ex-models."

Hah. Don't I know it. I'm small (make that 'microscopic') fry compared to Salon, but what I could do with a tiny, weeny fraction of the 50 million quid they've pissed up the wall... it makes me spit feathers. Trying to raise money for an internet business, even with a proven business model and a solid business plan, in the current climate is like trying to teach Bush Jr to read - a slow painful process with no guarantee of success no matter how much hard work you put in. The words 'Internet' and 'start-up' are dirty, dirty words still, and bank managers everywhere hide under their desks in terror the minute they hear them.

Thing is, not every internet-based business haemorrhages money out of every orifice. Some of us manage to keep our costs down by working our arses off every hour of the day, and (as was the case at 3am this morning) several hours of the night too. We don't have big offices, lots of staff and long lunches. In fact, we're lucky if we get lunch at all. Any business that involves the web gets tarred with the Boo brush, and I fear it's gonna be a long time before that changes, but I do take heart from the likes of Pyra, whose long term hard work seems to be finally paying dividends.

Meantime, I'll soon either be another internet bankrupt, or (and this is my preferred route) I'll find someone somewhere who's interested in stumping up a measley £10k to allow me to expand my business. Either way, I don't anticipate an easy ride.

The dark sigil Odegra and Thoth

2003-04-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

I've just got off the phone to my friend Natalie in Portland Oregon who, I was reminded, once gave a small tin-foil statuette of the god Thoth to Neil Gaiman. This fact has always made me slightly envious as I have never given anything to Neil Gaiman. I have a signed copy of Mr Punch, though, and the memory of a day some time in the mid 90s when my friend Kathleen, a multi-lingual American with whom I worked, went for lunch with Neil and artist Dave McKean. Another green moment.

So I looked Neil up on the net and found his blog. It’s kind of strange to think of Neil blogging, because for some reason one expects a successful author to do anything else in his spare time but write. However, I’m glad that he does, because this is going to be another one of my daily destinations and high on my list of displacement activities.

How generous the world is when it comes to providing me with ways to put off til next week tasks which, otherwise, I’d only be able to put off til tomorrow.

Sunday Sunday

2003-04-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

It’s Sunday, and if I had an ounce of sense, which I will be the first to admit I do not, I would have spent the day chilling out, maybe going to Tescos, and possibly slipping quietly into a pleasant coma in front of the TV. But, being stupid, I didn’t. I intended to spend the day working so that I can have a guilt-free Tuesday afternoon off to go up to London and acknowledge (you don’t really ‘celebrate’ much after 31) my birthday.

In actual fact, I spent an enjoyable several hours trying to help a friend of mine figure out how to get Soulseek working properly on a Mac. Trouble is, there’s a bit of a communications hitch in trying to give a Maccite advice when you are, however unwillingly, a PCite:

‘Ok, so now you right-click on the user’s name… What do you mean you only have one button on your mouse?’

Eventually, I got to see a screenshot of said Mac version of the Slsk user interface. And promptly gave up. Even someone of my prodigious assumption-making abilities can’t fathom a program from one screenshot alone. I did try to find a Mac Slsk faq online to assist in the fathoming process, but they all seemed to be in German.

Other displacement activities indulged in today included burning CDs of mp3s for various friends of mine to whom I have promised an insight into my musical taste. (More fool them for accepting.) Now, this whole mp3 thing is great, imo. I get to road test music before I buy it, hell, sometimes before it even comes out.

As the season for new releases descends swiftly upon us, I have found that I will not be purchasing The White Stripes’ Elephant, no matter how hard they hype it, but I shall be buying Blur’s Think Tank, despite the fact that I was fully prepared to hate everything they ever released ever again after they fired Graham Coxon.

I am also now desperate to find the money to buy Tom McRae’s Just Like Blood, Athlete’s Vehicles and Animals, Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown, The Dandy’s Warhols’ Welcome to the Monkey House, Turin Brakes’ Ether Song, and several rather marvellous recordings by bands/artists who will never get airplay on XFM (Jeff Hanson, Joseph Arthur, The Shins) but who were justly recommended to me by friends.

[Hint: if you haven’t bought me something for my birthday yet, please refer to the above list.]

If you were to believe the music industry (although why would you believe an industry willing to sell its granny into slavery for a quick buck?) you would assume that having downloaded these mp3s, I’m now happy with my music and will never again spend a single penny on tangible musical assets.

How wrong can you be? Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries, but I have to own the things I like. I don’t like renting movies if I can buy the DVD instead.

[Second birthday hint: Stargate Ultimate, My Own Private Idaho, Donnie Darko, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow… I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment.]

Instead of being the happy punter whose pfenigs are safe in her purse, the ability to download mp3s has resulted in me craving the ownership of these CDs in roughly the same way that I’m currently craving Thornton’s Champagne Truffles now that I’ve given up caffeine again (although that’s another story).

I certainly don’t think that an mp3 is in any way a satisfactory replacement for the CD. For a start, you can’t look at the pretty pictures in the booklet. Secondly, the sound of an mp3 can sometimes be, well, shit. Thirdly, I like the idea that my purchase in some small way contributes to the hedonistic lifestyle of some band through whom I can live vicariously, although I suspect that you can’t buy much coke with 7p.

But finally, this whole burning a CD of your mp3s thing is utterly over-hyped. The CDs fail to burn properly resulting in the wasting of many blanks. Some mp3s that played perfectly well on your computer turn out to be so full of pops and clicks when you play them on your stereo that they become unlistenable (and result in the throwing away of yet another CD). And the mp3s that aren’t poppy or clicky sound like they’ve been recorded under a duvet.

Nah, mp3s will never kill off CDs. That’s the job of the money-grabbing capitalist pig record labels who pass off piles of grossly over-priced shite as ‘product’ and hope that the record-buying public is too stupid to notice.

Oh, btw, I did get some work done. Eventually.

Ten signs that your internet dependency is getting out of hand

2003-04-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

1. Your morning routine is:
- get up
- turn computer on
- check and reply to emails
- check and reply to messageboards
- shower
- breakfast
In that order.

2. The numbers 24/7 fill you with a suffusion of joy, and yet the nearest all-night garage is miles away.

3. Your neighbours, whom you’ve only met twice in three years, worry that you’re not getting out enough.

4. You work for an internet start-up which entails working long hours, mainly online. When you get any spare time at all, you spend it… online.

5. Your biggest fear about flying to San Francisco is how on earth you’re going to cope without the internet for 14 hours.

6. The fact that they have 18mbps broadband in Japan seems like a perfectly adequate reason for moving there.

7. You have become adept at calculating time differences and know instantly exactly what time of day it is in any part of the world. The figures -8 and +9.5 are particularly important to you.

8. What used to be ‘TV dinners’ have now become ‘internet dinners’, and you only cook dishes that can be eaten with a fork alone, because that leaves you one hand free to type.

9. You regularly *emote* in your hand-written letters.

10. You have a list of Ten Signs That Your Internet Dependency Is Getting Out Of Hand, all of which apply directly to you.

Right… I’m off for some cold turkey. Anyone coming?

It's my party and I'll scrike if I want to

2003-04-12T05:50:00.000-07:00

I always knew that there was a strong risk of this blog becoming somewhat, er, circular, but I never imagined that it would happen this soon after revealing the presence of said blog to my web compatriots.

It happens like this… you discuss something on your blog. Then you discuss the same thing with someone who’s read your blog. They then quote your own posts back at you for their own entertainment. You then threaten them with publishing their comments on your comments on your blog which they can then quote back at you the next time you see them online… And so the decline into online mental unhealth proceeds.

I must admit, I toyed with the idea of a ‘what Neil said’ thread, but ultimately, MSN conversations are never the same when you read them back the next day. So you’re saved. Say thank you and pray it doesn’t happen again.

Anyway, other thoughts percolating through my grey matter today: Why won’t Blogger play happily with NTL? I have all this new web space to fill full of shite, and Blogger refuses to publish my blog to my NTL home page. I spent hours on Thursday going through every permutation of Blogger setting possible, but no dice. Instead I ended up watching Buffy trying to save Spike, again. Why she didn’t stake him first time round I’ll never know. I mean, he deserves it even if only for that godawful chipperfuckingcockney accent.

Why can’t American actors (on the whole) do British accents? This has bugged me ever since I was first terrified by the inane utterings of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins (Gawd bless ‘er) when I was nowt but a wee sproglet. Why do they think that if they drop a few haytches and convert a few ths to fs, they’ll sound like a Luhndaner?

At least James Marsters’ accent has improved over the seasons, but he really has no excuse considering that there’s a real Brit on set that could (one presumes) give him a few pointers. Or maybe Anthony Stewart ‘Oh would you like to come in for a coffee’ Head was too busy pissing himself laughing to be able to get a word out.

Finally, I learnt a new word last night. Scriking. Apparently, it means ‘crying’. I look forward to being able to work that into conversation very soon.

number five…

2003-04-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

I don’t much like war. And I don’t much like war flicks. I’m particularly unfond of that kind of stressed, nervy feeling I get when I watch violent flicks, so I was a little apprehensive about watching Ride with the Devil. It was recommended to me by a couple of friends, and it does feature the inimitable Tobey Maguire, and as I’m busy at the moment exploring his back catalogue I thought what the hell, I’ll give it a go, see what gives.

And what does give? Well… For much of the film I was curled up foetus-like in my chair, not really sure if I was enjoying myself or not. There’s shooting. There’s death. There’s a really grim scene where a guy gets shot through the cheeks and later on, when he takes a swig of liquor he kinda coughs and it spurts out the bullet hole. I’m cringing just thinking of it.

But in the end, this isn’t really a film about war, although the American Civil War features prominently. It’s not really about the Bushwhackers and the Jayhawkers. It’s also not really about two southern childhood friends who join up as horsemen to fight the Northern Unionists.

It’s about the slow dawning of realisation that what you thought was a noble cause was in fact a savage one, and that loyalty to your childhood friends and adherence to what you thought were your principles is in fact a betrayal of your true self. And that, like it or not, good can happen to you no matter how fast you try to run from it.

This is a majestic film. It draws you in, no matter how hard you try not to become involved (for surely sticky ends are going to be met, and I’m not a fan of sticky ends). Maguire is, as usual sublime. I keep using this word when I talk about his acting, but really it’s not so much the superlative adjective when used to describe Maguire, in fact, it barely does him justice. His presence on screen is astoundingly intense, it’s awe-inspiring. He carries the story in his eyes, where other actors rely on their lines.

But my admiration for Maguire aside, this is a great film. The scenery is beautiful, the script captivating, the story brutally absorbing. War isn’t portrayed here as organised - this is an ad hoc band of men fighting for as many reasons as there are bullets. Some, like Jake Roedel (Maguire), fight because they feel it is their duty, some fight because they simply like killing, some like Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) because they feel they have no choice. But with the bloody sacking of the Kansas town of Lawrence, both Roedel and Holt are forced to confront the fact that what they thought they were fighting for is nothing more than a mirage - they are instead fighting for men and principles they despise.

In Holt’s case, as a black slave whose bond was paid by his friend George, it’s the realisation that only George’s death can bring him true freedom. With George alive the debt of gratitude is as much a tie as slavery was - the only reason he’s not scalped along with the other blacks that the Bushwhackers come across is because he is ‘George’s nigger’. In order to pay back his debt of gratitude he must fight by George’s side even though he’s fighting for people who would gladly kill him themselves, let alone watch him die.

For Roedel, on the other hand, it’s a longer journey. He slowly comes to realise that what he is fighting for is not his way of life, nor is it to prove that he is a ‘true’ southerner. Always branded a ‘Dutchie’, Roedel can never truly become a Bushwhacker - his father and all the other ‘Dutchies’ are Unionists and that fact will always put Roedel on the defensive. This is especially true after he takes pity on a Unionist captive, arranging for him to be released in order to attempt to organise an exchange of prisoners. Instead the Unionist rides straight to Roedel’s Unionist father’s house and brutally murders him as revenge for his son’s political betrayal. Roedel is made aware later on that he was, in fact, responsible for his own father’s death. (Peter Parker, anyone?).

That kinda of reassessment of values in the face of tragedy is a theme that runs through Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm as well, which also features Maguire and about which also I feel simultaneously drawn in and shut out.

Part of the reason I felt slightly barred from full emotional participation in Ride with the Devil was, I have to admit, that I couldn’t entirely understand every word uttered by Maguire and his cohorts. You don’t get too many strong southern drawls in Reading and occasionally I just couldn’t understand what they were saying. Partly this is cos I don’t have a DVD player, so it’s all done with mirrors and cunning artifice (i.e. my computer and slightly crappy speakers).

That aside, I’ll be watching Ride with the Devil again. And the Ice Storm. If nothing else, I want to more understand these films - there’s enough character motivation and development in there to keep me analysing for months to come. And that is my favourite hobby right now, after all.

Oh, and in case you're wondering why number five - this is the fifth Maguire film I've seen in the last three weeks.

omg

2003-04-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

Just spent 90 minutes (yup, 90 - count 'em) on the phone to NTL to sort out my NTL email account. The cable modem goes like shit off a shovel, but the email and free web space just weren't playing ball at all. It seems that my account was so badly shagged that the guy on the other end of the phone had to remove and reset it all three times before we got it fixed. Good job that I was actually looking for a bout of displacement activity to save me from actually having to think this afternoon.

All that now done, I can add an email address to my template so if you want to hassle me and tell me how interesting I am, you can. Plus I can finally move stuff over to my personal web space and get it off blogspot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogspot, but you know, I like to have all my ducks in their own pen.

But why?

2003-04-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

One of my online friends, Jonas, last night asked me why I blog, and I couldn’t come up with a good answer. I’ve been mulling over this since, and I’m still not sure. Initially I wondered if it was the confessional urge, this inherent need to tell everything to everyone, but considering that when I started this blog I didn’t actually publicise it to my friends, I’m not sure that’s the case.

Maybe, instead, it’s just some inner need to write, a way of satisfying some fundamental aspect of my personality. But if it was just that, then why make it public?

Maybe it’s just displacement activity, some pseudo-constructive way of putting off doing the things that I wish I could delegate to the cat instead.

But I think the answer's a lot simpler than that. Why do I blog? Because I can. Since the dawn of time, humans have been doing stuff just for no real reason. From scratching geometric patterns on chunks of ochre to hacking. Why do it? Cos you can.

Copies of Spider-Man 2 Already on the Web

2003-04-10T01:16:00.000-07:00

I think this ties in very well with what I was saying in one of my earlier blogs. See, prescient or what? :lol:

Twice in two days

2003-04-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Well, would you look at that? Two posts in two days - quite a miracle don’t you think?

Ah, I feel like crawling into a crevice and staying there for a couple of years, after today’s exhausting excitement. I’m trying to locate some additional funds for my business, so today I met with a new Business Link advisor to see if they could do anything for me. That was a 9.15 meeting, so that meant actually leaving the house before 9am.

Now, normally I’m up some time between 7 and 8, and my 30 second commute to the lounge means that i’m at my desk well before 9. However, this does not mean I’m awake any time before midday. I’m not good with that breakfast thing, and I’m not good with any kind of movement or thought much before, oh about 5pm.

So having to actually leave the house and be intelligent (or faking intelligence anyway) that early was a strain. But the meeting went well, the advisor was impressed by my enthusiasm and my grasp of the issues at hand. Apparently. So fingers crossed someone comes up with the readies soon.

I made up for all that effort though. I bought myself a copy of Ride with the Devil, Ang Lee’s American civil war flick featuring, oh, I wonder who… might it be Mr Maguire? Oh, what a coincidence! I was talking to Nic (who runs a Welsh blog, MorfaBlog) on the phone on Tuesday and he recommended it. So I’m blaming him.

I also bought myself a copy of, wait for it… no, don’t laugh… Behind the Mask of Spider-Man. I said don’t laugh! I was actually in Waterstones looking for scripts to buy, but they had a pitiful selection. My eyes lit upon this instead, and the beautiful CGI Spider-Man on the cover, and it was a ‘have to have’ moment. I may even read it one day.

Flicking through it in the book shop, I did notice, however, one telling difference between the photos of stuntman Chris Daniels as Spider-Man, and the CGI created Spider-Man in the same scene, was the much larger thighs and genital region of the CGI Spidey. No really - it jumps out at you from the page. (That’s p. 155 in case you happen to be anywhere near a copy.)

Now, it’s long been the case that CGI women have bigger breasts and smaller waists than flesh-and-blood women - a quick glance at the history of Lara Croft demonstrates that only too well. Poor lass can’t stand up in a strong wind. But I’ve never noticed it so much in CGI men. It is, though, astoundingly noticeable in these two photos. I’m not sure what it says about the guy (and it’s not an unreasonable assumption that it was a guy responsible) that actually did this. Maybe he had some sort of wish-fulfilment thing going on.

I have to admit, though, that this is going to have me scrutinising Tobey’s crotch throughout my next viewing of Spider-Man. Purely for research purposes, obviously.

Finally, the stakes have been raised on this blog now. I’ve told people about it. Previously this was just me, ranting quietly to myself in the corner of the virtual kitchen, glowering at anyone who tried to come near the fridge and playing with the cat. Now there are real people visiting this. And I know that to be true because some have passed comment.

Then next stage will be to actually email all my pals/family whom I owe emails, and see if i can’t palm a blog off on them instead.

Er, does this mean I can’t say fuck anymore?

PS. MS Word can’t spell ‘fridge’. How fucking weird is that?

Hey guys! I'm not dead yet!

2003-04-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

Contrary to the rumours currently not circulating the internet, I haven't expired from overwork, nor have I been sold into slavery in Torquay. Instead, I've been doing promotional work for Pimms by drinking copious amounts of their product and recommending it to my pals in America. I look forward to going over to San Francisco and then Portland in July in order to show the Americans just exactly how you mix Pimms and lemonade in the correct proportions, how to hold a glass of said mixture and finally, the perfect technique for relocating it to one's stomach.

[pause]

[sips Pimms]

God I love working for myself. It means I can indulge my alci tendancies without risk of getting fired.

New amusements - everything Tobey Maguire. Spider-Man. Wonder Boys. The Ice Storm. Pleasantville. The Cider House Rules (co-incidentally on TV the other day so that saved me from buying the DVD). Even Cats & Dogs, although admittedly that's only a vo and the film's not all that good - the plot's so transparent you could use it as a window. But I have to rant here about Wonder Boys. I got the script from my new favourite site SoYouWannaSellAScript? and over the last couple of weeks have read and re-read it more often than I've checked my email. Yes. That often. And I am convinced that it is a masterpiece. It's just the delicacy of the script, the subtlety of the direction and the performances by Maguire, Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr, which are all sublime. Maguire has this intense stillness on screen, this almost Daoist ability to convey emotion with nothing more than the sixty or so muscles in his face. Most actors only seem able to use the one.

I'm really into reading screenplays at the moment. There's something fascinating about them, trying to picture them in your head, figure out how they got from just black splotches on the page in front of you to that amazing (or not) display of filmic movement and light. With Wonder Boys, it's easy. Same with Pleasantville - easy just to read and laugh and see the action unfold in your head. The Ice Storm was much harder going. Even after seeing the film now I'm not entirely sure I know what the fuck the point was. Still that gamelan soundtrack was one in a million, eh?

Which brings me neatly on to Tom McRae and his new album, Just Like Blood. I heard the single, Karaoke Soul, on XFM, and just immediately fell in love. Well, you know, I'm just such a musical slut - one moment it's Elliott Smith, then it's, er, still Elliott Smith then... er, well anyway. The opening track, A Day Like Today, has that gamelan sound to it that ties it up in my head with shots of ice-laden trees, Elijah Wood getting himself electrocuted and Tobey Maguire sitting on a freezing, blacked out train in the small hours. It's a great album, though, it's what David Gray would be like if only he were more interesting. Don't get me wrong, I've come to like David Gray pretty much in spite of myself. I spent a long time determined to hate him, but I guess i'm a sucker for miserable fuckers.

I bet Tom hates comparisons to David though.

Well, would you look at that... 5.35 already. Shite. Today's just got away from me. Like Tuesdays so often do. But I am determined to update this blog more often than once every five months. Determined, I say.

Where have you heard that before?

oooh, too long away!

2002-11-23T04:32:00.000-08:00

Hey peeps! Well, it's been a few months, and you might be wondering where I've been. Probably not, but it pleases me to pretend. Well, I've been working my small and perfectly formed arse off, frankly, doing stupid hours, working weekends and generally being a slave to the computer. So, what do I decide to do in my time off.. oh, yeah, right... damn. I must get out more.

Well, when the weather was more clement, I did get out a bit, and went on a rollerblading course with Citiskate in the old Spitalfieds market. I swear, me on rollerblades is like a whole new branch of physics. If there's only one tiny weeny little patch of oil in the whole place, then not only will i home in on it like my skates have some sort of oil-attraction properties, but I'll also do so at speed and already a little off balance. Some of the bruises were really kinda spectacular... anyway, I hired skates for the five-week course, which saw me go from only being able to fall over whilst stationary, to providing me with the skill and expertise to be able to both fall over whilst moving, and collide with other skaters no matter the avoidance manouvres employed by either me or them. I think I became a whole spectator sport, just by myself. I'm planning on getting my own skates when a) I have the cash (so that'll be the arse-end of never then) and b) when the weather improves a bit in the spring (er, ditto).

What else... oh yeah, Elliott Smith. I want to rant a bit here about Elliott, because he's not getting enough coverage (i.e. none) at the moment and no matter that he hasn't released a new album in years, the man is still a fucking genius. He has the voice of a broken-hearted angel, and it's just the most amazing sound I think I've ever heard. I used to think that Thom Yorke was the only person capable of making me shed actual tears just by the way he sings, but then Thom lost his head somewhere in his own colon at about the time of Kid A and frankly he kinda lost it. But Elliott, well, a more unassuming genius you won't come across, nor will you find someone who writes such achingly beautiful music, so delicately fragile yet lyrically quite dark and foreboding at times. He just takes your heart right out of your chest, rips it up into tiny weeny little bits and scatters it to the four winds. In a nice way, obviously.

So, I've been collecting his back catalogue, and I'm starting to get there - just the singles left to go, and the Heatmiser albums (his old band, before he went solo). Plus I've been downloading mp3s of rarities (I feel guiltless doing this, because I've already forked out a small fortune for legit releases), and whoa, there are some gems there. His version of Waterloo Sunset makes 'poignant' a serious understatement. Just amazing. I just can't wait for From A Basement On The Hill to come out, although no one seems to know when that's going to happen, or on what label. Still, keeps us on our feet.

Knickers!

2002-07-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

You know, I really must get out of the habit of putting my laundry out to dry at 10 in the morning and then forgetting to bring it in until after dark. It really is a bad move. Becasue you know what happens... you stumble outside at half midnight, trying to see by the crappy yellow street lights that barely even illuminate the pavement, let alone my garden, and you try to gather up your clothing as best you can, but it's inevitable. You are just bound to drop a trail of knickers behind you, so that when the postman comes at 7.30am you have the double embarassment of being both bed-headedly unkempt and facing the sight of your best black briefs draped becommingly on a red hot poker. (That's a type of flower, by the way, not something left over from Richard III's bedroom closet.)

Other than that... I have to report progress in the spider-terror stakes. Being a certified arachnophobe with a history of arachnid-inspired hysteria, I was very proud today to deal with a sizable spider using the glass-and-card method. I am well impressed. No hysterics, no screaming, no climbing over the furniture in an effort to escape. Not even a raised heart rate. Bargain!!

Yes, I'm still here

2002-07-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

I just haven't been able to face posting for the last, ahem, few weeks. Why? Well, spent most of the last month chasing round after banks trying to get funding for my business, and generally met an unfavourable response. At least none of them laughed. Although Nat West did ask some fucking stupid questions that, frankly, a three year old could have answered by herself. Obviously they're too thick to actually read the business plan and find out for themselves that I actually do know my competition, and that I'm not actually providing a service that the BBC already provide. Dickheads.

But then, that's banks for ya. They look at the figures, don't like them, then come up with some assinine reason for rejecting your request for funds. I'd rather they were honest and said, 'Frankly, we don't like your figures'. But no, they have to say things like, 'Well, we're not really sure about the market'. Of course you're not sure, you dolt. You're a bank manager. I'm the expert in my particular field of business. I've done the research and it's all there in black and white, and if you weren't too thick to be able to read words of more than one syllable, you'd be able to actually read the business plan and find out for yourself whether there's a market there.

Y'know, there's no point doing these business courses, and consulting with advisors, and spending three months preparing a business plan. You might as well just throw a fictional cashflow together overnight and save yourself a lot of shit.

*sigh*

Ok... rant over. Promise. (Although I do feel better for it. I did get quite antsy with some of these banking dickheads, but then it doesn't do to sink to their single-cellular level.)

Anyway, I did eventually get funding for my new business, and since that happened, I've been rushing round like a blue-arsed fly, trying to actually get everything in place to actually start the everything going. Which is a whole different kettle of fish to just thinking about starting a business. Sort of like the difference between reading Ranulph Fiennes' book about walking across the Antarctic, and actually walking across the Antarctic. Whilst you may cringe at the description of the puss-filled blisters that ate away at his feet, it's not quite the same as actually having puss-filled blisters. Not that I have had puss-filled blisters, although I did once burn the bottom of my feet and end up with blisters the size of satsumas. I couldn't walk for several days, and it really was quite unpleasant. But not, I hasten to add, as bad as puss-filled blisters and the inevitable frostbite that curses all polar explorers. Which I'm sure is much worse.

It's really nice to think that I am, finally, my own boss. Not just pretending to be my own boss in that self-un-employed way, but actually having a business, and a limited company and the whole nine yards. In fact, it's more like ten... but it is scary. Exciting, but scary. And exciting. But very scary.

I think you get the picture.

So, tomorrow is Saturday. Another working day, but not without it's lay in. If the cat will let me. Which this morning she wouldn't, having decided to play trampoline on my bed at 5am. Even locking her out doesn't work - she just sits under my window and miaows like some pitiful little kitten that I know she's not. Bless.

Hm, right, so what was I saying? Er, dunno... not that that matters, because I know no one is actually reading this, so I can be as self indulgent as I like... *sigh* Ah, the catharsis of confession without the embarrassment the next day when the alcohol clears and you suddenly remember what you said...

Monkey Boy's out

2002-06-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are at another Wimbledon, and isn't it lucky that it started before the World Cup finished. Now we can all focus our attentions on willing Timothy on to the finals instead of whining about England getting knocked out by favourites Brazil.

That was really starting to get on my nerves, actually. What a bunch of hypocritical tossers people can be - firstly, no one thought England would qualify, then they didn't think that England could get through the Group of Death, and then we weren't going to get past Denmark... then when Brazil knock us out suddenly it's 'not good enough', and the team are a 'failure'. Come on! We should be damn proud that they got so far! The team was a young and (to some extent) inexperienced one, key players were carrying injuries, and Brazil are well known for slaying us at footie. Add to that in inconsistent ref, and Seaman's horrible fall which really shook both him and the rest of the team and it's no surprise that we suffered at the hands of Ronaldo and his chums. Of course it's a disappointment that we got knocked out, but really, there's no need to slag our lads off. They did better than expected, and all deserve a very big hug. Specially Becks...

Anyway, back to Wimbledon. All those instant footie pundits have now become instant tennis pundits (and yes, I count myself amongst that number!), and I'm sure that all of them were just a tad surprised to see so many of the top seeds knocked out yesterday. And it's only Wednesday! But I'm quite pleased that Monkey Boy's out, with his perma-gape, hairy arms and the personality of a brick. It's dull when the same people always win (cf. the World Cup final, and F1), so with Safin, Monkey Boy and Agassi out of the running, who knows what will happen next. Maybe our fair Timothy even has a chance - or Rusedski. Of course, if Tim doesn't make it, everyone will shake their heads knowingly and say that they never did think he was really capable, and what a disappointment he is. The fact that he's one of the best players in the world, and that he's achieved so much in his career will just pass them by. After all, it's far easier to criticise failure than it is to celebrate partial success. Especially when it's someone else that you're criticising.

2-1

2002-06-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

Arse.

Motivation - what is that exactly?

2002-06-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

Well, today is turning into a disaster day. Not because anything in particular has gone wrong. Far from it, as nothing much has happened today to go wrong. But today is still a bad day for me. I work for myself, and when I should be working on a grant proposal (involves obtaining large sums of money, therefore very important) I find myself instead sucked in to the world of Heartless Bitches International. Instead of boring the pants of myself by yet again writing letters saying why my project deserves funding, I have instead spent most of today chortling quietly at the rants against Nice Guys (i.e. insecure pricks who blame their crap love life on everyone but the person to blame - themselves - then claim that women don't like nice guys). If you have something really important to do today, then I recommend visiting HBI just so that I'll know that I'm not the only one who's going to hit 5pm with a large feeling of guilt having wasted too much time.

But of course, HBI isn't the only way I waste my time during this critical grant-application period. Oh no. Blogging is taking over my life. You know how it is - you start off wanting to get one little thing off your chest (or where-ever else you keep it) and you end up an hour later with a 59 page dissertation on the state of the world, your life, and those prats that drive large noisy boats past my house at 6am without turning their fucking engines off. Wankers.

Ok, maybe that last point is just mine, but you get the gist.

But when it's 6am on a Sunday morning, I really do get the urge to launch some sort of large, pointy missile at the noisy, arrogant, selfish gits. Sadly, the urge to go back to sleep is somewhat more powerful.

And talking of sleep, I did it again last night. I laid there in bed, drifting into that blissfully interesting hypnogogic state, and wrote this whole blog, my grant proposal, and the first two chapters of a would-be best seller chick lit hit. Then I fell properly asleep and the whole lot went. Every last word. So much so that I can't even remember what it was that I was going to rant about today. Arse.

Right... there's no footy today, so no excuse. I'll just have lunch, then pop round to the shops, then I'll read one more rant on HBI, then I'll really get right down to work. Honest. No, I will. Promise... Hmm, I do have a few emails to reply to, and then I'll get back to work. Oh, and last night's washing up...

Brainpower and hypnogogic states

2002-06-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Don't you always find yourself feeling most creative whilst a) on the loo, b) walking, c) staring out of the bus/car/train window or d) just as you're dropping off to sleep? By far my most creative time is that period when your head has hit the pillow, your brain is winding down and you slip into that hypnogogic state where you brain is firing off a load of random images in a strange slide show and your imagination works on little minidramas that you repeat over and over and over and over and over... and then you fall asleep and forget the whole damn lot. I hate that. In those moments I create the most perfect conversations/pieces of prose/book opening chapters etc, and it riles me no end that those never-to-be-repeated bursts of creativity be lost forever.

Well, maybe not. New Scientist have just run a story that discusses how existing technology is sufficiently advanced for amputees to run an artificial hand just by brainpower alone. I'd love to give you a link to it, but it's not on their web site, so you'll have to go and find the article in the print version - issue 2347, 15 June 2002, p22. Anyway, if researchers continue to refine their techniques for interpreting the complex electrical signals that our brains are contantly emitting, perhaps one day they will be able to create a machine that captures your thoughts, dreams and those perfect pieces of hypnogogic prose. I keep my fingers crossed (but only when not typing).

Meantime, I am in glorious celebration of Korea beating the crap out of the Italians. They deserved it. What a pathetic game the Italians played, doing that 'oh we've got a goal, let's be really boring and defend for the next 70 minutes' thing. Of course, this doesn't mean that I think England wouldn't totally thrash Korea if it came to that, but we've Brazil to deal with first. I'm saying nothing on that. I'm only an instant pundit anyway - just add hot water (or alcohol - the choice of lubricant is yours), a world cup and shake vigourously.

Oh, and one final word... Beam me up Mate! Ok, that was four... but some Australian researchers have managed to teleport a bright beam of light and quite frankly, that impresses me no end. (I was about to say, 'That impresses the crap out of me', but somehow that didn't seem to read quite right.) Anyway, they used the effect of entanglement, which is something that boggle my mind every time I read about it. But I have a problem with all this. Basically, as I read it (and I could be wrong), they destroyed the original beam of light, and the second entangle beam appeared at a different location. Not far away, but nevertheless a significant distance.

Of course, this is only teleporting light - anything of the size of an atom poses a major problem and who knows if they'll ever actually do that. But if they do, is this really teleportation as we understand it from scifi? Surely that involves disassembling a thing, transmitting it somehow, then reassembling it somewhere else? That's what Scotty used to do. I'm not sure I fancy the idea of destroying thing A only for the entangled twin, thing B, to appear somewhere else. Because then thing B isn't really thing A, it's just a replica, so would it have all the same attributes of thing A, or would it be just a facsimile? Surely this is just like faxing a document from fax A, destroying the original, then saying that fax B is in fact a teleported version of the document?

Right, History of Britain by Simon Schama calls, and who am I to deny him?!

Offside!

2002-06-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that the USA are one up against Mexico already. Wtf happened there? I mean, most Americans don't even know what football is (i.e. it's football, it's not 'soccer'), and as for America being in the World Cup, half of them are somewhat unaware that there's a world outside of America in the first place. Unless they're bombing it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely anti-American, just partly. Some American things are good, for example... er... um... damn... Well, ok, I won't start on the list of things that are bad, but let's just say I'm glad that I didn't have to go through the American school system and suffer the total humiliation that would have been Prom. Eugh.

Anyway, I didn't mean to come on here and whinge about either footie or America. No, I came here this morning to whinge about my cat. Who totally failed to wake me up this morning at her customary time between 4am and 5.30am with a pitiful, begging miaow outside my bedroom window. I could have handled that - I've trained myself to get up out of bed, let her in, and get back into bed without even so much as waking up. But this morning, a great absence of miaowing at the customary time woke me at 6am, and I ended up having to go upstairs (my house is upside down - you get used to it) to open the front door to let the little scamp in. Trouble was, I was wide, wide awake. I toyed with the idea of getting up and doing something useful, but my inner sleeper told me to go back to bed and make the most of that last hour of slumber.

So why is it then, that when my alarm goes off at 7pm (theoretically allowing me half an hour for breakfast and to shower before the footie starts), I lie there in a semi-comatose state, totally unwilling to move? I mean, an hour beforehand I was all sprightly and feeling very awake and alert. I eventually crawled up the stairs at 7.30pm, and still haven't had breakfast, although the footie is on behind me. (Further proof that I am a stealth geek - first action of the day is to check emails and to blog, not to have breakfast... eek! Must get out more.)

Anyway, I consider this yet more proof that too much sleep is bad for you - it just makes you even more tired. I used to be able to sleep nine or 10 hours a night, regularly, without any trouble, but always felt a bit ropey. Then I cut it down to eight... and now to somewhere around seven, and I feel much better, much more energetic. But after waking up after only six hours last night, I wonder if maybe seven hours is still too many? There was a piece in the New Scientist which draws a rather scary conclusion about how much we sleep:

"People who sleep for eight hours or more every night have a higher death rate than those who average six to seven hours, according to a new US study."

So all these years I was a right little sleep demon, I was slowly killing myself? Eek...

Post number one

2002-06-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought I'd start up this blog as a way to empty my head of all the crap that tends to accumulate in it. You know how it is, all those thoughts that keep piling up, one upon the other. Before you know they start leaking out of your ears... most unattractive, really. So you have the choice, enjoy trawling through the random crap in my head, or go somewhere else. You've been warned so don't come running to me when it doesn't makes sense.

That said, of course, I suddenly find myself with a head emptier than Tony Blair's. I'd love to start talking all about my thrillingly exciting life, but the truth is that I don't get out enough. Or much. At all, in fact, at the moment, due to a rather nasty pain in the bank account. That, in turn, is due to my perpetual state of self-unemployedness: a voluntary state where one lives in hope that somehow, this latest harebrained scheme will somehow actually earn me enough to pay my rent. Which is astronomical. But that's what you get for living in the commuter belt. Not that I would actually choose to live here if I had my choice over again, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Actually, I think I'd almost like to live back in London. Well, it's that or North Wales. It's cheap, I could afford a house, and it's just beautiful there. And there's no air pollution. And I speak a little Welsh so that would be a bonus. Right now though, I can barely afford to go to Tescos, so surfing the net for houses to buy is a kind of masochistic act designed only to make me feel wistful.

Ah, yes, see, only a couple of paragraphs into this and I'm having a nice whinge already. You know, it's very theraputic, this. Like morning pages. If you don't know what morning pages are, then never mind, but if you do, then you should try this public whinge thing. I always had a bit of a confessional streak in me, so this is really perfect. I'd make a good catholic if a) I was a catholic and b) it didn't have that religious bit attached to it. But I could do the sitting in a small cubical thing, confessing my sins, my imagined sins, and all the stuff that generally went wrong today. I could really get into that. I suspect, though, that the priest would eventually ban me for talking too much. Or give me a couple of thousand Bloody Marys just to shut me up for a moment or two.

Of course, a lot of the blogs that I go and look at on a semi-regular basis have links to interesting sites on the net. Well, not this one. I'm a bit short on time, really, so my surfing's fairly limited at the moment. Sorry. Of course, I'd love you all to think that I'm quite the most interesting person you've ever not met, but I think the truth is that no one will actually read all this shit. So it doesn't really matter anyway.

But that said, I would like to mention Roswell Rods. I saw this documentary on Sky 1 about these weird things called rods which are appearing on video tape. They're long, thin, and appear to have pairs of wings that run their length and allow them to 'swim' through the sky very quickly. Far to quickly to see with the naked eye. That's why they're only caught on film.

Of course, a lot of people think that these are just insects flying close to the camera, but my inner jury is out on that one. Some of the footage was, I admit, quite convincing, but the thing that caught my eye was a high-speed stills photo. I've never, ever seen an insect caught on stills film look like this thing did. They didn't tell us just how fast the film was, but I would guess that any insect caught on normal high speed film would appear as an insect, not as a long rod-like thing. I'm not convinced at all that insects can move fast enough to create a blur on a fast film. And it can't have been close to the camera, because it wouldn't have then been in focus...

Hmm... anyway, there's a programme on Sky right now about dead people. Always fascinating. But rest assured, I will come back to this rods thing later...