Recently in Randomness Category

Dear wonderful hive mind of the internet: I'd like some advice.

My girlfriend Christine currently has a bank account with the Royal Bank of Scotland, but has been notified that RBS has sold its branch network to the Spanish bank Santander and that Santander will be taking over her account in the near future. This is despite RBS owning another high street bank, NatWest.

Santander have grown quickly - they took over Abbey National a few years ago and have since gobbled up the 'good' half of Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. But this has been at a price - a recent poll on Money Saving Expert rated them by far the worst bank for customer service, and that former Alliance & Leicester customers have had the worst problems. These have included having their accounts essentially frozen for days at a time during the switchover.

Obviously, Christine would like to avoid this, so we're on the look out for something new.

Santander, for all its faults, does have a good deal at present - new customers get £100 and a high interest rate on the first £2,500 in their current account for 12 months, but to qualify she would have to move to them now to be classed as a new customer. Similarly Halifax's reward current account, which I have, pays you £5 for every month where you pay in at least £1000, though again Halifax does not score highly for customer service.

The best of the larger banks seems to be The Co-operative Bank but there isn't a branch in her home town of Blackpool - the nearest one being 12 miles away in Preston.

So, internet people, what are your suggestions? Ideally she needs an account she can access online as well as in branch, and one with a bank that isn't likely to cause her problems. How do you each feel about your current bank, and would you recommend it? Please let me know in the comments.

I've been sent a package by the PA to the National Railway Museum's Director of Fun, Sam Pointon. While it may not seem odd for a museum which is popular with families to have a director of fun, Sam is only 7 years old, and he's been there for a year now.

Sam, or rather his PA, has asked me to write about my experiences with the museum and tell you about some of the events that are being held this summer, so here goes.

Like Sam, when I was his age, I was also very keen on trains - having a father who worked for British Rail helped as it meant lots of free rail journeys. I also grew up in York, home of the NRM and was a regular visitor - at one time, my mum took me almost every Sunday, even when there wasn't free entry like there is now. My earliest memories were of its 'Great Rail Exhibition' in the former York Goods Station, as at the time the main hall was receiving a new roof - now both the main hall and goods station are used for the museum and open to the public, and further expansions have added a workshop where you can see classic trains being overhauled and restored, as well as access to some of the museum's archives.

Moving out of York in 2002 has meant that my visits have been sadly less frequent; the last one being in 2007 which included a trip on The Yorkshire Wheel, a London Eye style big wheel which was unfortunately only a temporary attraction and is now elsewhere. As well as seeing classic trains from both the UK and overseas (there's a driving car from Japan's Bullet Train, for example), there's plenty of information about the history of Britain's railways, and various interesting artefacts.

This summer, a sand sculpture is being built from 20 tonnes of sand by the same people who created a sand sculpture of Charles Darwin in Centenary Square in Bradford last summer. There's also a major 1930s exhibition, linked in to the recently restored streamlined steam engine the Duchess of Hamilton, which you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

The National Railway Museum is a really great museum and you can easily spend a day there. There's plenty to do, whether you're a young child or a grown-up child like me. Best of all, it's free, and only a few minutes walk from York station. You should go and visit it sometime.

It's July, which means that we're now more than half way through 2010. Still feels like April for some reason, despite the very summery weather we've had lately.

I haven't had chance to blog much so this is a summarised version of things that I would have devoted posts to had I had the time.

Films:

• About a year ago I wrote about films which I own but haven't watched. I finally watched Robots last night and it was actually better than I had expected. The computer animation is wonderfully detailed and it's a lot of fun. I'm starting to wish I'd watched it sooner.
• On a related note, I have copies of Eragon, Ghostbusters II and the first Twilight film which I own but haven't seen. All in good time, I suppose.
• I saw the trailer for The Last Airbender a couple of months ago and it looked good, but the reviews of it suggest it's totally rubbish, so I'll give it a miss.

Your Freedom:

• I was intending to write something about the government's Your Freedom site, which asks the public for ideas about laws that need changing or repealing. It's a good idea but badly executed, and Chris Applegate sums it up much better than I can, so read his blog post.
• But, for the record, I'd like to see the Digital Economy Act repealed.

The Internets:

• Some time in late April our ADSL modem at home started acting up, and ever since it's been happily dropping packets left, right and centre. It's a Netgear DG834GT, which isn't a bad model but it's several years old and has been rather over-used. The wireless has gone as well so I'm using my spare Netgear WGR614 as an access point. Anyhow, we're finally getting a new modem from Sky and so I'll actually be able to do things like play World of Warcraft without lagging and download files without them timing out

Holiday:

• Things will be quiet around here again as Christine and I are off to the Isle of Man for a week, starting tomorrow. We don't have a solid itinerary but are planning a trip to see the Laxey Wheel and a train ride up Snae Fell.

As I mentioned yesterday, we went to Morecambe for the day - it's a small coastal town in north-west Lancashire, close to the border with Cumbria. Pictures will be uploaded to Flickr later this week.

We went by train - there's a shuttle service from Lancaster twice an hour and a few direct trains from Leeds each day, but there are also regular buses from Lancaster bus station too. The train station is set back from the sea front - an earlier station on the front was closed in 1994 and having been restored now houses a pub, the tourist information office and an events venue - but there's a path which leads to the promenade. The paving on the path has various popular poems written into it in a modern art style - worth a look.

We did the quieter southern end of the town first, unintentionally. There's not much around there - a closed theme park (although a large tower remains in use as a mobile phone mast), and a seafront public garden. Then there's the Eric Morecambe promenade which takes you for just under a mile towards the next town of Heysham which is the local port. The paving here includes occasional slabs which detail Morecambe's history - it starts from the Heysham end heading towards Morecambe though. It's very nice, and makes for a good, quiet walk.

The main town has the Winter Gardens, which looked rather closed when we went past, and the statue of Eric Morecambe, which was surrounded by people with cameras. There's also the stone jetty, which is the sole surviving pier in the town and used to house yet another train station which met ferry services - these no longer operate, but the station building survives as a café.

Evidence of busier times gone by is all over the town - it originally had two piers, both succumbing to fire or bad weather, and the aforementioned theme park closed around a decade ago. However, the fact that it is quieter than its nearby neighbour of Blackpool makes it more pleasant, and no doubt attracts a higher class of tourist who isn't so interested in the tackiness that exudes from most of Blackpool's seafront. It's certainly somewhere I'd consider living in, as it's close to Lancaster and seems quite quiet, with magnificent views across Morecambe Bay towards the Lake District with its mountains and forests.

It was a good day out, and I'd recommend it to anyone fancying somewhere for a quiet stroll.

I really hope that I will soon be able to post a more positive article about my adopted home town of Bradford. Alas, this isn't such a post.

Photo of The Love Apple by Andy Howell, CC licensed

Over the weekend, a bar called The Love Apple closed down. It's been open for 13 years and is sited in the West End, an area around the Alhambra Theatre which has several bars and clubs. It was one of the few independently-owned venues in the city, and as well as being a café serving food during the day also served as a night club and music venue on an evening. I was in there on Friday and its closure has come as a surprise and shock.

Unfortunately it's just the latest bar in the West End are to close. Walkabout, the Australian-themed chain bar, closed in October (the parent company of the chain has had financial issues so closed its weaker outlets which included Bradford). Gasworks, a nightclub focussing on rock and alternative music, moved to a smaller venue elsewhere in the city centre earlier this year. And a couple of months ago, the student chair bar Varsity closed its Bradford venue, again after being open for several years.

A new nightclub opened last month, called Mode, however, unlike the 3 bars that have closed down it's not open during the day. The area is now very quiet during the day, with just Wetherspoons and Revolution open (both big national chains). Some other clubs remain (Tokyo, Coco/Crystal and Ché Bar) but they're all nightclubs and not open until the evening.

This has all come in a time when the city centre bars haven't had to compete with the university's student union - the student union building was closed in June last year for rebuilding, but will re-open this September with new bars. Ironically both Walkabout and The Love Apple have been used to host student union events in the absence of their own venues.

It's a shame - when I came to Bradford in 2002, this area was busy in the daytimes as well as at night.

As a birthday treat, Christine took me to The Box Tree last night.

The Box Tree is one of only a few restaurants in the north of England to have a Michelin Star, as well as a variety of other accolades. As someone who has never been to such a place, my visit was filled with both pleasure and a lot of nervousness. Compared to the friendliness of mainstream restaurants, this was a distinctly formal affair.

On the plus side, it was a lot easier to relax after around half of a bottle of Vin de Pays d'Oc.

Of course, it's all about the food, which was exemplary. The menu often changes and as such the web site only shows a sample menu. My main course was a shoulder of lamb served on casoulet base, which was lovely.

Such experiences are pricey and a three course meal for two with wine did - just - break into a three-figure sum. It's not something I'd do every night but it made for a fantastic birthday present.

Today is my birthday. I'm off to Leeds to celebrate.

That's a tag cloud showing the artists that I have listened to over the past 6 months, weighted by how often I listen to them. As you can see, I quite like Ash and Nightwish.

If you have a last.fm account, you can generate your tag cloud here. I'm nrturner at last.fm by the way.

Thanks to Kevin for the tip.

In my 'Bradford - a tale of two stations' post a few weeks ago I mentioned that many plans had been made to connect the city's two stations together over the years but nothing had come of it.

The latest set of plans have been published by a couple of local businessmen. It would create a new station called 'Bradford Central' which would be on the bridge carrying the tracks through the city. This would be linked to the existing bus station at Bradford Interchange but it's probable that the two railway stations would close under the plans.

The proposed station certainly looks good in the artist drawings, and very little demolition would be necessary - just the Royal Mail depot at Forster Court (which has been earmarked for eventual demolition anyway as far as I am aware). It would take some land from the Westfield development but would have the advantage that the site would be very close to the station - therefore increasing footfall in the proposed shops. There's even a chance that Westfield would help fund it, as they did in London when their White City shopping centre opened recently; this saw a new railway station, new Tube station and another Tube station extensively refurbished with Westfield putting up a lot of the money.

The projected cost of the scheme would be £100m, which is a lot of money. We've just come out of a recession and the massive public fund deficit means that money from central government is probably not going to be very forthcoming.

The design of the station would make any potential expansion difficult - it provides 4 platforms but this is less than the 7 that the two existing stations provide between them. Of course, should the platforms at Bradford Interchange remain open for terminating services then potential capacity problems would be alleviated somewhat. However, adding extra platforms to the new station would be very difficult due to its elevated state, and the probably lack of land to expand into.

Despite all this, I really, really hope that this comes to fruition. The current station at Interchange looks very dark and tired, and needs replacing. Enabling through services, rather than having trains reverse, would make routing trains through Bradford more attractive. And it may be the catalyst that gets the Westfield development back on track and would give people more reason to visit the city. But it's early days and we've been in this situation many times before - I'm not getting my hopes up.

One of the things said about Bradford is this:

Bradford has two train stations - but you have to change at Leeds to go anywhere!

While that's not strictly true, as Bradford does have regular direct services to York, Manchester, Preston, and, from later this month, London, to go to many places outside the north of England it's necessary to change at Leeds or Manchester. Bradford may have two stations, but both are quite small and only serve regional trains and commuter services - apart from the aforementioned London service starting in 3 weeks time, there are no inter-city services.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

You may have inadvertently seen this week's App of the Week post, which I accidentally published by mistake (I normally write them a few days in advance). If you didn't, you'll see it as normal on Wednesday.

Since Christine is away this weekend, and we're having trouble with our internet, I've been trying to keep myself busy with things that can be done on an unreliable internet connection (basically ruling out World of Warcraft and anything streaming from iPlayer). I've ended up playing through Tales of Monkey Island. It's rather good - the humour of previous titles in the series is still there - although I needed help from the walkthroughs from time to time. The graphics weren't great on my Mac - I get the impression it doesn't use a lot of hardware acceleration and so the framerate was quite low, especially at higher resolutions. There's also an interesting plot twist after the credits on Chapter 5...

Today I'm off out to Skipton for the monthly farmers' market, and possibly to look around the castle.

Today is the national day for England, in honour of our patron saint, George. Unfortunately it's not a public holiday and so therefore I'm at work this morning.

Thankfully, I'm off this afternoon to go to a wedding.

This is an entry about the Caldervale Line, which takes trains from my home town of York, through to Bradford where I currently reside, and onto Manchester and Blackpool, where Christine lives. As you can imagine, I use this railway line a lot.

Technically speaking it's a 'route' rather than a 'line', as the sections of track were built at different times by different companies and it shares tracks with other services for a number of sections, but it's known as the Caldervale Line. This is because it passes through the upper Calder Valley.

Bradford and Blackpool are on roughly the same latitude, so in an ideal world there would be almost a straight line between them. Alas the Pennine Hills are in the way, and so the railways tend to follow the valleys and serve the communities in them. Indeed, on leaving Bradford the trains head almost due south, before then curving around to face south-west to reach Halifax.

The line certainly isn't the most modern in the country. It saw quite a bit of attention in the 1980s, when a number of stations closed in the 1960s were re-opened, and new trains were introduced for some services in the early 1990s. But apart from a new junction outside Bradford there hasn't been much significant investment in the line of late. Some sections, such as the 9 miles between Burnley and Todmorden, have very slow line speeds of around 45 mph, compared with the usual minimum of 60 mph elsewhere. Consequently, the train from Bradford to Blackpool takes 1 hour and 50 minutes, which is slower than it would be to drive (around 1 hour 35 minutes) despite the driving route taking you via Manchester and being much further in distance.

But some changes are afoot. South of Bradford, a new railway station at Low Moor should be open by the end of 2012, again to replace one closed in the 1960s. Blackpool trains, which skip many intermediate stops elsewhere, won't stop there but it will be served by a number of local services, and its location close to the M606 on the site previously occupied by Transperience means it will be suited for park-and-ride facilities. Manchester Victoria station is due for a major refurbishment and by 2017 there should be more frequent services to Bradford, as well as new direct services to Manchester Airport and Liverpool from Bradford. A new section of track will allow trains from Burnley to reach Manchester via Todmorden, although this plan is presently unfunded, And the line connecting Blackpool to Preston is due to be electrified later this decade, although that will largely benefit local services and not trains from Yorkshire.

A faster service to Blackpool from Bradford would be most welcome - obviously it would be nice for me but if it becomes faster than travelling by car then it will be more likely to pull in extra passengers. New or refurbished trains would be nice; while the Express Sprinter trains that usually run on the line aren't too bad, they're in need of a refit as many carry most of their original fixtures and fittings which have become well-worn over the past 20 years.

The Caldervale Line is a useful route, covering a long distance and linking many northern towns together, but it could really do with some more TLC. Hopefully in 10 years time I won't have to use it so much, but I can hope that if I do it'll be a quicker and more comfortable experience.

Sometimes I get half-way through writing a blog entry, and then realise that what I'm saying is utter rubbish, or a largely unintelligible rambling of disconnected thoughts. Rather than post a poor-quality, unarticulated entry, I'd rather just scrap it.

This happened just now while trying to write out the reasons why I won't be voting for the Conservative party in the forthcoming general election. There are lots of reasons (their poor record on gay rights, memories of them being rubbish before 1997, bigoted attitudes of some of its members, hostility to the public sector, being too close to Rupert Murdoch etc.) but I had trouble getting those disconnected statements into paragraph form.

So here's a picture instead:

Courtesy of MyDavidCameron.com.

I was planning a whole series of 'Why I won't vote for X' entries, but some of them would have been terribly short:

• UKIP - because they're bigots and I don't like their anti-Europe stance
• BNP - because they're outright racist and seem to think banning immigration is the magic bullet for all of this country's problems
• Respect - because George Galloway is a bit of a... use your imagination.

The three parties I've given significant thought about voting for are the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Green Party. I may post about why I would or wouldn't vote for these parties nearer to the 5th May.

If it wasn't already apparent, my previous post on April 1st was indeed an April Fool. I'm not intending to stand for parliament any time soon, especially not as an independent candidate. However the feedback I've had suggests a handful of people (especially some of my friends) were, at least initially, taken in by the fool, which is great as it sounds like it did its job!

To say I'd planned this for weeks would be an outright lie - I only had the idea whilst walking home the evening before. The timing of the next general election, which is likely to be the first week in May and due to be formally announced on Tuesday, meant it was topical. I've also had dabbles in student politics in the past, although nothing recently.

The web site may have looked relatively good but it was actually knocked up in about an hour, using a standard Movable Type template. Each page is a 'Page' in Movable Type and I just edited the widget sets to create the navigation. The domain name is one that I've owned for years but never used - in the past, it's just been a mirror of the main site.

I think most people realised it was a fool when they started reading the policies. Personally I feel the best fools are ones that initially sound plausible, but gradually leave the realm of believability.

This was the first time I've done an April Fool in some time. While I'm glad people liked it, it'll make topping it next year more difficult...

As many of you in Britain will know, there's due to be a General Election next month. And I'd like to announce that I'm to stand as an independent MP for Bradford East, my local constituency.

This may come as something as a surprise, but recent issues such as the economy, Digital Economy Bill, electoral reforms and changes to the libel system have helped me decide to run. I've been planning this for some time and decided that this was the right time to do it.

I've set up my campaign web site, but to summarise, here are my policies:

Economy

We're recovering from a major economic disaster. I want to help the recovery by:

• Introducing a 'Robin Hood Tax', where merry men dressed in green shoot bows and arrows at bankers until they pay them to stop.
• Ringfencing public funds by putting them all in a locked filing cabinet, which will placed in a disused toilet with 'Beware of the Leopard' on the door.
• Procuring a leopard for the aforementioned disused toilet.
• Introduce taxes on homoeopathic remedies, to be reviewed when the homoeopathic industry can prove that homoeopathy actually works.

Environment

Climate change is a major issue, and one that will affect everyone in the world within our lifetimes. I propose:

• More electric cars, with extra long extension leads so that they can be plugged into the mains while in motion.
• Funding development of technology that can turn the hot air generated in the House of Commons into electricity. I expect this to be able to power around 40% of homes in Greater London.
• Encouraging Bracknell Forest to live up to its name and have more trees, in the hope that it'll feel less like a soul-less new town.

Technology

Britain has been credited with many great inventions - the television, the computer and sliced bread. I hope to continue this by:

• Increase research funding to universities, especially those investigating hoverboards and flying cars. This is to ensure that Back to the Future Part II is an accurate representation of 2015.
• A 50p tax on all broadband connections to develop The Matrix.
• Make all government services available on the internet, and allow British citizens to control more aspects of Parliament, such as the contents of MP's lunchboxes and the colour of the lights in the House of Commons.

Immigration

Properly managed immigration is key to ensuring that our economy grows and the best talent is attracted to our shores, but without allowing a free-for-all to over-stretch our public services. I propose:

• Voluntary repatriation of all members of UKIP, BNP and readers of the Daily Mail to a small island around the mid-Atlantic ridge.
• A compulsory initiation for those wanting to become British citizens, which involves getting drunk on white cider, stripping down to their underwear and shouting the national anthem while stood on a park bench.

I will announce further information once I and my campaign co-ordinator, Loofa Pril, have discussed our next move.

This morning the UK did its annual switch from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time. On the one hand this is good, as it means we're one step closer to summer (and the weather here in Bradford is glorious).

On the other hand it's a pain because I get 1 hour less in bed and need to change all of my clocks (bar my Mac which like most computers will update itself). This is especially annoying when you have to get up at 8:30am, which feels like 7:30am due to the time change.

I'm not even sure if the time change is of any use in the modern age. Surely we could stick to GMT all year round and adjust the times we get up ourselves? Would save a lot of effort in the long run.

As for why I'm getting up so early? Christine and I are off shopping in Manchester.

Subject: Concerns about the Digital Technology Bill

Dear Mr Rooney,

Having recently moved to your constituency from elsewhere in Bradford, I'd like to draw your attention to the Digital Economy Bill, which has just passed its third reading in the House of Lords.

I'm very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The law is controversial and contains many measures that concern me, such as the potential for web sites to be censored. It has also been written to satisfy the interests of major record labels and not of the general public - even the British Phonographic Industry, the trade body for major labels, admitted this in a leaked memo.

The statistics which have been used as a basis for the bill are flawed, and only yesterday it was announced that music royalties from legal downloads are increasing faster than the decline of sales of CDs.

There are also fundamental human rights issues that this issue raises and ,a href="http://www.out-law.com/page-10754">the Joint Committee on Human Rights has stated that it cannot rule whether the laws introduced in the bill would be compatible with the Human Rights Act.

Industry experts, internet service providers and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill - yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn't just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate.

Many thanks for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Neil Turner

I will let you know if I receive a response. With thanks to Tim Duckett for some of the links used.

Apart from yesterday, I've managed to post something on here every day for the past 3 weeks. Admittedly a lot of the posts were cheating - I tend to write several entries at a time and then schedule them to appear later in the week, to give the impression that I'm able to post daily. Unfortunately I didn't have enough inspiration to have anything queued up for Sunday, and was out with Christine and my potential future mother in law for most of the day anyway.

I was hoping that posting every day might increase the amount I make from Google Adsense but any increase has yet to materialise - in fact, so far this month I've yet to even make £3, which is significantly down on last month. And that was a bad month.

Part of the reason for this may lie with the server move - I didn't migrate many of the .htaccess configuration files, which I use to manage redirects. The URL structure of this site has changed several times over the years and so a series of redirects are used to keep links from other sites pointing here. Unfortunately many of these redirects weren't brought over, so some popular entries like quickly compress PNG images (featured prominently on digg and Download Squad) resulted in a very plain 404 error page. They should now redirect correctly, and I've also whipped up a better 404 error page, which is written using MT's Pages feature.

At some point I need to install a better stats package on the server - it came with Webalizer which is rather basic and doesn't show any information about errors. I may give AWStats a try since I've used it before but am open to other suggestions.

At the weekend I wrote a new Wikipedia article about Transperience.

Transperience was a museum that I was aware of when I was younger but I had never had chance to visit during the short time it was open. It was essentially an open-air museum of passenger transport, with some simulators as well as a working 1km tram line and a couple of trolleybuses. There was also an auditorium and some workshops were its preserved vehicles were maintained.

The museum was built on the site of Low Moor station, south of Bradford. The station used to be at the junction of the Caldervale Line, between Bradford and Manchester, with the Spen Valley Line which ran through Cleckheaton, Heckmondwyke and Liversedge. The station, and the whole Spen Valley Line, were closed in the 1960s, but the Caldervale Line thankfully remains (otherwise my regular trips to Blackpool would be far more difficult).

Despite being right next to junction 2 of the M606 and easy reach of the M62, and costing £11.5million to build, the park closed in 1997, having been open a little over 2 years. Unfortunately it couldn't attract enough visitors to be viable, and was £1million in the red by the time it was taken over by administrators. The land was mostly sold off to a private developer and is now an industrial estate. The route of the tram line now forms the first part of the Spen Valley Greenway, a footpatch and cycle route which follows the route of the Spen Valley Line. Some buildings, like the auditorium remain, but overgrown and derelict.

Interestingly, the site is likely to go full circle. Metro, the public body which manages passenger transport in West Yorkshire, has plans to re-open Low Moor station. Its location close to the M606 means it would make a good parkway station, and means that residents of Low Moor and towns in the Spen Valley won't have to travel into central Bradford or Leeds to catch the train. It's likely that the few remaining relics of Transperience will be tarmacked over by the new station's car park. The station is proposed for 2012, subject to planning permission and funding.

It's a shame that I never had chance to visit Transperience, as it seemed like an interesting museum that suffered from poor marketing and a lack of focus. Thankfully, museums such as the Crich Tramway Village have succeeded where Transperience failed.

This post is prompted by remarks by Nigel Farage, an MEP for the UK Independence Party, in which he described Belgium as a "non-country". I think the criticism levelled at Belgium by Mr Farage is unfair and reeks of a 'my country is better than your country, so nyah' attitude, which I feel is unacceptable for a supposedly respectable politician.

As a Brit, I feel it is therefore my duty to do my bit to show Belgium that we don't all think that your country is insignificant. I personally think that the country has several things that are great about it, and once I have some more cash I plan to make another visit to the small but interesting nation.

1. Brussels

Brussels is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of European Union. I visited in 2002 (back when this blog was barely a month old) and found it to be a great city. It's well worth a visit and is (usually) less than 2 hours by train from the centre of London.

2. Belgian beer

We Brits are quite good at making beer, and the explosion of micro-breweries over the years has been very welcome. But the Belgians are also worthy contenders and I particularly appreciate their fruit beers such as those by Früli, Timmermans and Liefmans. Leffe is also particularly good, as is the amusingly-named Kwak which comes in an interestingly-shaped glass. Budweiser is also now owned by a Belgian company, but unfortunately that doesn't stop it tasting a bit like a urine sample.

Bruges

I really want to visit Bruges again, as it's been almost 2 decades since I was there last. It's a gorgeous city, full of canals and old buildings.

Belgian chocolate

While I will always have a soft spot for Cadbury's Dairy Milk, the Belgians have chocolate making down to an art.

Belgain waffles

Belgium is the country that introduced the concept of a sweet waffle, perhaps with a Belgian chocolate sauce or some ice cream. I'm genuinely pleased that Wetherspoon's have started serving these again.

French Fries

They're actually Belgian, not French.

This year, Bradford has had a German Christmas Market, where traders from Germany (and a few other European countries) have set up stalls over here to sell their wares in the run-up to Christmas. German markets have been increasingly popular in many British cities and Bradford, desperate to attract people to the city centre, signed up for a market to run for 4 weeks.

This would be the start of week 3 of the market, but they're already packing up to go home.

Unfortunately, barely anyone has actually visited the market. I walk through it on my home from work each day and it has been almost dead. A couple of weeks ago I took a few photos, which look fantastic but also show how deserted it was.

Bradford is in an unfortunate situation where a significant part of the city centre has been demolished to make way for the now-mothballed Westfield Bradford development. More and more shops are closing and new shops aren't opening, since the customers aren't there - Bradford is so close to Leeds that people will probably prefer to go there, with its greater range of shops and many more independent retailers. Consequently, no companies are willing to invest in a shop in Bradford.

This is why we can't have nice things, like German markets.

Update: Wakefield has also had problems with its German market which has also finished earlier than planned.

Ahoy me hearties! Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I'll be sailing the seven seas with me cap'n and ship in search of treasure in far flung lands! Arrrr!

Translation: I'll be on the M62 with a driver in a minibus picking up students from Manchester. Arrrr.

It's good quality, too. Remember, you can buy it here.

Also take a look at a new design by the same designer, which is up for voting. Monkey Island fans take note.

Those of you familiar with the character of Admiral Ackbar from the original Star Wars films will know his most well-known line - "It's a trap!". Those who don't can brush up at Know Your Meme.

Anyway, one of my friends from university has designed this t-shirt:

Ackbarpography t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com

It's available to buy from Split Reason for $18.95, which works out at around £20 when you include international postage. I've just bought one.

Dave from Blogography has revealed his secret flowchart for writing entries. As I was having trouble thinking of something to write myself, I decided to follow it. And here's what I came up with:

(In my defence, I'm not an artist and I no longer have access to Hari's Wacom drawing tablet - that was drawn with a rather cheap wireless mouse)

I'm afraid I am about to post a music video which ranks as one of the most annoying songs of all time:

Once you have watched it, and presumably received relevant counselling, I'll explain myself.

The song is called "I want a 1-2-1 with You", unsurprisingly, by a band calling themselves the Solid Gold Chartbusters, but who are actually better known as The KLF. It wasn't a very big hit, being released in the run-up to Christmas in 1999 along with other novelty songs.

But it's notable for being one of the first songs to use a ringtone as part of the main melody, in this case the default tone used by Nokia phones. Of course, in 1999 we didn't even have polyphonic ringtones, never mind MP3s, so it was a series of beeps. And the "1-2-1 with you" idea was almost certainly inspired by the UK mobile network One2One, originally part of Cable & Wireless and since bought out by Deutsche Telekom and re-branded T-Mobile.

Why am I mentioning this? In 2005, some marketer who probably deserves a rather painful death came up with the idea of combining the Crazy Frog ringtone with the song Axel F, in this instance covered by the Bass Bumpers. This song, rather unfortunately, went on to be UK number 1 and spawned a whole album of songs which were mercilessly destroyed by El Frog. At the time, it was claimed that this particular cover of Axel F was the first time that a ringtone had been made into a single, as opposed to the other way around which is what normally happens. While it was the first ringtone-based song ever to be number 1, it certainly wasn't the first song to be released.

It also happened to one of those random songs that I vaguely remember seeing on MTV 10 years ago that for some reason surfaced in my mind, and so I decided to share it. You're probably wishing I hadn't, though.

Since it's the 1st of May, and I haven't linked this before apparently, here's a video celebrating the start of Spring:

Please note that it's rather NSFW - cartoon nudity and swearing.

Update: Thanks to Waxy, here's a link to 1st of May performed using American Sign Language.

Normally this is the sort of short musing I'd reserve for Twitter, but I'll treat blog readers to it too.

Anyhow, Firefox 3.0.0.10, a minor security and bug fix release, is out, and so I've updated my Windows copy of Firefox - as I run Windows Vista in a somewhat seldom-used virtual machine I was still running 3.0.0.8, so the updater downloaded the full 9.2 MB patch rather than the smaller 1.5 MB patch if I'd had 3.0.0.9.

What struck me was that the 9.2 MB file downloaded in about 10 seconds, although this is to be expected for a 10 Mbps broadband connection. The thing is, I remember about 8 years ago, when I was still using dial-up, and how long files would have taken to download. That 9.2 MB file would have probably taken the best part of 45 minutes on dial-up - more if the connection was being used for anything else at the same time.

Sometimes, it's worth taking a step back, and looking at how far we've come with technology. I still find BBC iPlayer genuinely amazing, for example.

This is a screenshot of the National Rail Enquiries website, specifically the 'transport links' section of the information page for Denton station in South Manchester. If you can't read the screenshot, or if the page gets changed, it says the following:

Location for Rail Replacement Services: Outside the Rovers Return on Coronation Street

For those who are not familiar with British TV shows, the Rovers Return Inn is a fictional pub in the soap Coronation Street. Though the soap is set and filmed in Manchester, there is no such street anywhere near Denton station.

It's therefore likely that someone at National Rail Enquiries, or whoever supplies the data, had a little joke, because it's highly unlikely Denton will ever have replacement bus services (or at least, not in the near future). Denton station is currently only served by one train per week, currently running during the daytime on Fridays, on a service between Stalybridge and Stockport. The station itself has just one platform, and there aren't even any signs there - just a bench and some lights.

Denton Railway Station © Copyright Eifion Bedford and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

It was never always like this. Back in the early 1990s, the Stockport to Stalybridge line saw a regular service. This was because trans-pennine trains from Leeds would call at Manchester Victoria, which only serves other local and regional services. Mainline services to London and Scotland instead departed from the bigger Manchester Piccadilly, and so this service allowed those wanting to travel from Leeds to destinations south of Manchester to bypass the city and connect with mainline services at Stockport.

But the trans-pennine trains were diverted to Manchester Piccadilly in the 1990s and Metrolink started operating in 1992, and so this service was seen as largely unnecessary. But because the trains on this route were the only ones that called at Denton, and Reddish South further along the line, the decision was taken to keep a minimum service running to avoid the legal processes of formally closing the stations. Thus, the service that now runs is a 'Parliamentary train', to maintain the 'legal fiction' that the station is open when in fact it is all-but closed.

There are at least 10 stations in the UK which are served by one service per week to keep them open. Some others have been closed 'temporarily', which means that no trains need call there but a designated rail replacement bus operates. A recent example was the Watford and Rickmansworth railway in North London - closed in 1996 but it was still possible to buy train tickets to it nearly 10 years later. Thankfully that line may have a future as the proposed Croxley Rail Link.

Apparently the main criteria for the 'lifetime achievement award' in the 2009 Bloggies is to have been blogging since 1st January 2004. This reminded me that last week was my 7th 'blogiversary', having started on the 14th January 2002.

That's almost 1/3rd of my life. Woah.

Just want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Presents? I got a 4th generation iPod Nano (in blue), a Canon EOS 350D digital camera (passed down from my father), a digital photo keyring, Denon in-ear headphones, socks and a veritable feast of edible treats.

• This time next week I will be unemployed. Unfortunately my short-term contract at work hasn't been renewed so I'm looking for work for after Christmas. Thankfully I have some money saved up to keep us afloat for a couple of months and don't have any major expenditures on the horizon.
• I'm finally back to developing web sites for people again, for the first time in a while. This one is entirely in Movable Type 4.2 (since it'll be hosted on this server) and requires minimal design effort.
• Yes, I did buy Wrath of the Lich King. Yes, this is the main reason why I haven't been blogging so much lately. Yes, one of my characters is level 80. And no, I haven't created a Death Knight yet.
• Not done anything particularly interesting on the computing front either, apart from my adventure with VirtualBox. Though it's a bit slower than Parallels 3 at present, it seems to do most of the things that made Parallels good, but for free.
• Though I don't talk about her incessantly anymore, Hari and I are still happily living together. October was the third anniversary of our first date, although I didn't write about it at the time. Before you ask, any engagement is off until we're in a better financial position.

2 months ago, I posted a list of films that I own on DVD which I haven't yet watched. And guess what? I still haven't watched them.

In fact, I forgot to mention on that list that I had also bought The Simpsons Movie, which although I ended up seeing it twice at the cinema last year, I haven't managed to watch it on DVD.

And what's worse is that I now own two more DVDs - Ice Age and Robots (came as a double-pack for £4 from Morrisons) to add to that list...

Hellboy is probably the first of those that we're keen to see - neither me nor Hari have seen it yet and we want to watch it in case we find time to see Hellboy II at the cinema. We're also currently renting the Sweeney Todd film with Johnny Depp in it from LoveFilm, which we need to find time to watch.

That being said, it may well pan out that one of the main barriers preventing me from blogging more and watching films in my spare time may no longer be an issue soon. Before you get worried, it's nothing to do with my job, or my relationship with Hari - we're getting on just fine together.

Car insurance gone up again? Want to compare the cheapest insurance, but don't know where to start?

Then go to www.comparethetescosconfusedmoneysupermaket.com! *

It'll help you compare the best price comparison sites, so that you get the best deal for you!

In all seriousness, with the number of price comparison sites cropping up, I'm surprised no-one's come up with a meta site that compares the comparison sites.

* Doesn't actually exist. Yet.

Watch this advert:

If you haven't watched it, or can't for any reason, here's the synopsis:

The advert sees a man making sandwiches for a young boy and girl, who address him as "mum", while another man prepares for work. Before the second man leaves with the children he shares a kiss with "mum", who adds: "Love you. Straight home from work, sweet cheeks."

To me, it's mildly amusing. But to at least 175 people who made the effort to complain to Ofcom, it's downright offensive.

Okay, last time I checked this was 2008, where gay-bashing is regarded as a hate crime, discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal and same-sex couples can have civil partnerships with the same legal rights as a married different-sex couple. We have gay characters in various prime-time TV shows, too. But it looks like even in this country old attitudes die hard.

Oh yeah, and Bill O'Reilly seems to be annoyed by it, but that's predictable I suppose.

Of course, all the buzz around the advert, negative or otherwise, keeps the product in the limelight, so it's a nice bit of marketing on the part of Heinz. But I really don't see what all the fuss is about.

• Shrek 3
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Hellboy
• Nacho Libre
• Family Guy presents Blue Harvest

Of those, I haven't even seen 3 of them at the cinema/on TV.

This is mostly a mental note to make sure that next time there's nothing good on TV, I get around to actually watching these films - after all, I've paid money for them.

I've been away from this blog for some time - 2 weeks almost - which is mostly due to being busy at work and having very little free time at home as I've been playing World of Warcraft a bit more than usual lately (but now have a second level 70 character as a result).

So what's happened over the past 2 weeks? Well, based on my recent Twitters, here's what I've been up to:

• Been testing out Firefox 3 RC1 and Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1. Firefox 3 is looking really good now, especially on Macs where the improved performance and native theme make it even more of a joy to use. Thunderbird is obviously an early alpha build but it too is much faster, as it inherits many of the optimisations that were undertaken for Firefox. Unfortunately it's not yet very stable, but it is at least usable.
• Now that I have more than a smidgen of free space on my MacBook, I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron in Parallels. Unfortunately, despite updating to the latest Parallels release, the Parallels Tools for Linux package doesn't work with this release of Ubuntu so there's no adaptive window sizes, cursor integration and clock synchronising. It's a shame as apparently VMWare Fusion does support the latest Ubuntu release. I haven't played around with Ubuntu much but it looks good, and including Firefox 3 is a bold but welcome move.
• Speaking of Twitter, I would recommend the TwitterFox extension if you use Twitter and Firefox, as it's quite a handy little extension which lets you read and interact with your Twitter friends. It doesn't have masses of features, but it's intuitive and it works with Firefox 3 already.
• Google Reader's 'Trends' feature has an unexpected use as a way of digging out feeds which haven't updated in a long time. I found one that had gone dead in October 2005 that I was still subscribing to. I also found a few sites which had changed their feed URLs without redirects so I wasn't receiving updates any more.

This, unfortunately, isn't the return to regularly scheduled blogging, as on Saturday I'm going away for five nights in camping barn in the Lake District with some friends. It's really in the back-end of nowhere - it doesn't even have a connection to the electricity grid so all power comes from a hydro-electric generator, and it's highly unlikely that there will be any mobile phone reception there either. So until I return on Thursday, you may not hear a peep from me, either on here or on Twitter.

I'm making sure I post something here today, since I can only do it once every 4 years. No marriage proposals yet, though.

I'm off to spend a weekend at the seaside in the vicinity of Scarborough, which will be nice provided that the weather is better than the wind and rain we have in Bradford right now.

Created using Skitch, hence the funky but un-graph-like arrows.

Happy Valentine's Day. Hope you all have an enjoyable day, whether it's with someone special or otherwise.

(No, we're not doing anything special today, for the record)

As well as wining about unsolicited press releases from a clueless PR company, here's some other things that I've wanted to blog about lately but haven't:

• As an epilogue to my most recent Royal Mail saga, the package did arrive on Saturday as requested, albeit at 7:30am. Now I'm not normally awake at that time even on weekdays (I get up at 8am to be in work for 9, since it's a short walk away) never mind at weekends, but, hey, it arrived. And Hari now has a working external hard drive again, which is good.
• Related to that, be wary of the Western Digital My Book series - this was what necessitated ordering the package (a USB IDE disk enclosure) in the first place. Hari's unit was only around 15 months old when the soldering on the USB socket on the hard drive enclosure completely broke away, so it couldn't be connected to a computer. You'll also have a devil of a job getting the drive out of the enclosure should you wish to do so.
• Looking back at an old entry, five years ago today I wrote about macmoz.org, a site for resources about Macs. Back then I didn't have a Mac (I do now) but apparently the site has been dead since 2004, which is a shame. Obviously it never took off.
• Speaking of Hari, as well as getting a new enclosure for her hard drive, she also now has a graphics tablet to play with. This was actually my Christmas present to her but it's taken me until now to get it set up on her computer - though she could probably do it herself, but never mind. It's a Wacom Bamboo One, which is one Wacom's smaller but cheaper tablets aimed at those starting out. I've heard good things about Wacom tablets and this was the only one in my price range, so although the drawing area is small I went for this rather than a larger tablet from another manufacturer. It works well, and once you install Wacom's drivers it is very accurate (it can work on XP without drivers but the accuracy leaves something to be desired; it's also Mac compatible). It also suits Hari well - she's left-handed but uses her right hand for the mouse, so being able to draw left-handed is much easier, and she's drawn some good pictures already.
• icanhaz.com is my new favourite URL forwarding site, in the ilk of tinyurl.com. I can haz shrt urls? Kthnx.
• You may remember back in April I mentioned I was going to begin the Mac Mini Media Centre Project - a project to turn my under-used Mac Mini into a media centre. It was to be a regular series of posts detailing each step of the project, but I only managed the one introductory post. The good news is that there has been some progress and the Mac Mini is now running as a media centre of sorts, but not quite in the same way as originally envisaged. However, I do hope that I will get around to posting more information about what I have done, and what I planned to do and didn't.
• And yes, I've still not upgraded to Movable Type 4.1. All in due time, all in due time...

1. There is a phobia of bridges, known as Gephyrophobia - and there's a New York Times article about it, via Kottke.
2. The platforms at St Pancras International Thameslink railway station are labelled 'A' and 'B', to avoid confusion with the main national and international platforms. This was also used at the recently-closed King's Cross Thameslink station (which St. Pancras replaced) and at Waterloo East station.
3. Though all Mac Pros now come with two quad-core Intel processors as standard, you can opt to have just the one processor, saving around £320 (to a total of £1442.99). You can also spend over £17 000 if you want every build option, unlimited server license and all the professional software packages bundled with it.
4. In the past year, thieves have stolen at least two bridges in Russia for scrap metal.
5. 'Akbar' is Arabic for 'great' or 'greatest'. I'd be tempted to post a picture of Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars and say it is a trap, but I'll refrain.
6. Frederick Lorz, an American athlete, cheated in the marathon in the 1904 Summer Olympics by travelling by car for 11 miles. He was first across the finishing line but another athlete, Thomas J Hicks was declared the winner, despite him too cheating as he had run the race under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
7. In China, 'Dan' is a girl's name.
8. VLC can use many Winamp skins - see this guide.
9. 'Blighty', a slang word for 'Great Britain', derives from the Hindustani Urdu word 'vilāyatī', which variously means 'foreign' or 'homeland'. It originates from the days of the British Empire when Britain controlled India.
10. Inner Mongolia is a region in northern China, 'Outer Mongolia' roughly corresponds with the independent nation of Mongolia.

In the financial year 2004-5, 10 people bought train tickets for Watford West station. This is despite the fact that the station is 'temporarily closed', and no trains have served it since 1996, and part of the railway track leading up to it has been lifted.

But it gets better - apparently more people bought tickets for Watford West than for Gainsborough Central station, which is still open and still served by trains, albeit only one per week.

Incidentally the 'one train per week' strategy is used on a handful of stations in the UK as it is cheaper than closing the stations altogether. Another example is Tees-side Airport station, which has one service in each direction on Saturdays, despite it being the station for Durham Tees Valley Airport.

Because I'm feeling uninspired, I'm going to link to some other interesting things I've seen around the web lately:

• Londonist is a blog about London from Gothamist, a similar blog about New York. Right now there's a lot about St Pancras International (see picture above), the new Eurostar station, which looks fantastic. They also used one of my photographs in an article.
• Michael Robertson, the entrepreneur who started mp3.com, Linspire and now mp3tunes.com, is writing about how his latest venture is being sued by EMI for purported copyright infringement. The suit is, hopefully, without merit for the reasons Michael explains, but it's a good background to what is wrong with the music industry.
• For those of you not following the political situation in Pakistan, the former international cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has been arrested and charged under the country's anti-terrorism act. Imran is also the Chancellor of the University of Bradford, and as I am now an employee of the university I can't comment any further.
• Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, says that he predicts that Scotland will be independent from the rest of the United Kingdom in 10 years time. So The Guardian light-heartedly wonders what it will be like without Scotland, and the implications that independence will have for both countries. For example, what the Duke of Edinburgh will be called and whether he'd take the title of 'Duke of Miltom Keynes'.

As I hinted above, I now have a full-time job at the university. It's not the one I was interviewed for and it's only for a few months but it does mean I am in a better financial situation.

I'm quite possibly going to be a bit busy over the next couple of days, and am spending the weekend in the Lake District, so I may not be able to write much here. So, in lieu of something useful, here's a YouTube misheard lyrics video for "Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce. And no, the song has not been sped up.

This is the 3500th entry to this blog. Just so you know.

(Also, this marks the resumption of cross-posting between here and my LiveJournal, now that I have the MT4-compatible connector working. Cross-posting to Vox should come just as soon as it's bug-fixed)

Back in April, I wrote a list of 8 films I was intending to see this year. Of those, I haven't seen Hot Fuzz or 28 Weeks Later, though I should be getting the former to rent sometime soon, and I haven't seen The Simpsons Movie because it isn't out yet.

Yesterday Hari and I killed 2 birds with one stone and saw both Shrek the Third and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the same day (taking a break in between to go for dinner). Shrek 3 isn't quite as good as 1 and 2 but it's still a very good film, and Harry Potter 5 is as least as good as the first 4 films. The fact that this is the fifth film in a series and it doesn't totally suck is a testament to J K Rowling's writing and the directors/screenplay writers - pity the same can't be said for films like Police Academy V...

Hari and I also went to see Wedding Daze (also known as The Pleasure of Your Company) a few weeks ago, mainly because we wanted to go on a date and that was all that was on at the cinema at the time that interested us, but actually it was quite enjoyable, if rather random.

There are, of course, other films that we're considering going to see this year:

• Transformers - I've heard some very mixed reviews of this film and so we may be renting it rather than going to see it in the cinema.
• Ratatouille - Pixar make good films and the reviews suggest this is no exception, but alas us Brits have to wait until mid-October before this film is out here.
• Stardust - saw the trailer for this before Shrek 3 yesterday and it looks pretty good, and it's based on a Neil Gaiman novel.
• Evan Almighty - I enjoyed Bruce Almighty so with a bit of luck this won't disappoint. Again, the US gets this first, it's not out here until August.
• The Golden Compass - the film based on Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. Not out until December.

I'm back from Wales. I'll post something more meaningful soon but I'm going to be busy for the next few days - though at least this time I will have internet access.

Had a great time though and have lots of photographs to catalogue and sort.

• I mentioned the mock driving test on Wednesday, which I had yesterday, and it was, unfortunately, a fail - failing to stop at a zebra crossing when someone was waiting, which I realised just as I was driving over the crossing. Had I stopped, I would have only made 8 minor errors, so it would have been a comfortable pass, and I could have had fewer than that had I not made a couple of mistakes which made me lose my cool for a bit. I also did what was probably my best ever parallel park, which made me quite happy. Next mock test is this coming Thursday.
• On Tuesday, to celebrate my dissertation being handed in Hari, took me out for food and a film, the film being Sunshine (3rd on the list of films I am intending to see this year). I would thoroughly recommend the film, although it does play with your mind and is quite scary in parts.
• I've been elected the social secretary of the university's hiking club, so from September I'll be planning the club socials. We're going hiking around Haworth on Sunday, which should be nice, especially as the weather looks sunny this weekend.

• No, I'm not dead, I just haven't felt the need to blog for almost two weeks. I know that's slacking but it's my blog and I'll slack if I want to.
• The big news is that my dissertation has been finished and handed in, so I'm basically finished now. For real this time. All I need to do is get a proper job...
• Booked my graduation ceremony, and once again baulked at the ridiculous prices being charged for gown hire and official photography. My gown, which I have to wear to the ceremony, cost £40, and the photography was another £30 on top (and that was the cheap package). Admittedly my dad is a good photographer and has a good camera but my grandma will probably moan if I don't have the official photo for her.
• At the weekend I went to what was essentially an organised piss-up in a brewery. The brewery in question was the Black Sheep Brewery, a real-ale brewery in Masham, north of Harrogate, where we had a tour and then spent the rest of the day drinking there and at other fine establishments in the town, before making our merry way back to Bradford.
• It's now just over 2 weeks until my driving test. My lesson last week wasn't the best, mainly because the car I've been learning in during the past few months was undergoing repairs so I was in a different car. It was still a Vauxhall Corsa, but with one big difference - it was a diesel. And had a very different gearbox which meant that I stalled a lot, especially at lower speeds as its second gear isn't as flexible as the petrol version. But, I drove in it again yesterday and having got used to its differences I did pretty well. I have a mock test tomorrow, to track my progress.

• I went down to see Hari yesterday at her parents' house in the West Midlands. She's okay - I'm going back home to my parents' house again today but we're both back in Bradford this week as term starts again a week today. The university now only give 2 weeks off at Easter rather than the original 4.
• Both my parents and Hari got my the exact same easter egg - Green and Black's Maya Gold. Either great minds think alike or I'm too predictable.
• This is old news for those who know me well but I finally have a date for my practical driving test - May 10th. It now means that I've got a date to work for, and I'm reasonably confident that I'll pass first time.
• My latest toy is a program called Lighthouse, which essentially brings UPnP (and NAT/PMP) to your Mac, and allows you to dynamically open ports on your router when you run certain programs that require them. For example, when you run Adium, it'll open the relevant ports for AIM Direct Connect and file transfers, or when you run Bittorrent it'll open a port to allow remote connections. The program is $13 to buy, although I picked it up for $9 when it was on MacZOT! last week.

Did you know that, in Britain, it is illegal to 'adulterate' tea, by contaminating it with other substances to reduce the manufacturing costs or to deceive people? The law is called the 'Adulteration of Tea Act' and was passed in 1776.

Says an awful lot about us Brits, doesn't it?

(Incidentally a similar but older act banning the adulteration of coffee was passed in 1718)

1. Hot Fuzz - no, I haven't see it yet.
2. 28 Weeks Later... - the sequel to 28 Days Later.
3. Sunshine - another Danny Boyle film which Gia has been involved in.
4. Spiderman 3 - coming out this summer, at last.
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - which is out around my birthday.
6. Shrek the Third - enjoyed the first two and has some interesting cameo voices.
7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - because it's Harry Potter. No David Tennant this time though.
8. The Simpsons Movie - Not the biggest fan of The Simpsons (prefer Futurama/Family Guy) but should be good.

And next year we have The Chronic-what-cles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which hopefully will be as good as the first one.

Side note: My British English spelling dictionary in Firefox does not recognise the word 'movie'.

I've just ordered this book about April Fool's Day by Martin Wainwright. It covers both the history of the day itself, as well as some of the most well-known April Fool's jokes, such as the island of San Seriffe and the Spaghetti Harvest. With a bit of luck, it'll be here in time for this weekend as I imagine I may be spending at least part of Saturday sat around waiting for people.

In a similar vein, Wikipedia is bracing itself for April 1st. It's apparently one of the worst days for wiki vandalism.

• I spent the weekend away from Bradford, hiking in the Peak District with the hiking club. The weather was pretty good (if a little windy) and we managed to do plenty of walking, including up Mam Tor, the local famous hill. There's about 100 MB of photos sat on my laptop awaiting sorting and uploading to Flickr, which should happen sometime this week.
• On the computing front, I have been playing around with CrossOver Mac which is now available as a final version (as opposed to the beta versions). I'm now able to run Shareaza reliably, which was something I couldn't do before. I'm also becoming increasingly impressed at Songbird - the new version 0.2.5 is pretty good and it's showing a lot of potential.
• Over on FaceBook I've amassed 88 friends in less than a week, and they're all people I know. That beats the 60 or so I have on MySpace, even after several months.
• Thursday is the student union elections here at Bradford; this year I'm neither standing nor part of anyone's campaign team so I'm helping out on the ballot boxes and with the count. If you're a student at Bradford, please go and vote in it :) .
• I'm still waiting to get a date for my driving test, but we're now concentrating on pure practice sessions ahead of it. I managed to go through 3 hours of lessons without stalling last week and for the most part I'm quite confident about passing the test; I just wish I had a date to work to.

I'm using a cluster machine in the university library, and for some reason the computer's clock only seems to go between 00:00 and 00:10 before going back to 00:00 again. It's as if it's stuck in a post-midnight timewarp.

What's more bizarre is that the date is almost correct (it says 3rd March 2007). Can't think why the clock is stuck like that, but it's a bit annoying.

• Yes, I am back from London
• Yes, we had a good time
• No, we didn't do much sightseeing
• No, I didn't take many photos
• Yes, I will be writing a proper entry at some point :)

A recent conversation with Hari:

Me: If I get this job, I'll hopefully be working with Macs.
Hari: Who?
Me: Huh?
Hari: Who's Max?

Bless her little cotton socks.

(No, she's not really that stupid, just a blonde moment)

OpenID

Well, it looks like the whole OpenID thing isn't going so well, with several problems reported. Some seem to be related to the mod_security system on the server, which I can't control; others seem to be bugs with the Movable Type plugin I'm using. I'll look into what I can do about it but I may bring back TypeKey logins for the people who want to use it.

Today

Today I did something involving a badge, stairs and the phrase "I couldn't find a yak at short notice". More explanation later.

The dissertation

The dissertation is, in fact, not over. Oh no. That's not until April now. It's a long story but consequently I'm still a student for another couple of months.

Overdraft

I've had to extend my overdraft again. But thankfully some sources of income have appeared on the horizon so hopefully I'll either be able to pay it off or at least stop running into more debt, which will be nice.

London

Hari and I are off down to London next weekend. We're going to a West End musical and some sightseeing; I've not been to London in other a year so it'll be nice to go there again for a few days.

Here's a little game - what is the name of the cartoon character in the image below?

Post your answers in the comments :) . I'll say who it is tomorrow or later in the week.

Update: Well, that didn't take long :) . It's Tidyup from the 80s cartoon series Stoppit and Tidyup which was famously narrated by Terry Wogan, presumably taking time out from his Radio 2 show and belittling various European pop acts during Eurovision.

I was hoping it would be obscure enough for most of you not to get it straight away, but oh well. I'll have to think of something harder next time :) .

"I'm here without you baby, but you're still on my lonely mind,
I think about you baby, and I dream about you all the time,
I'm here without you baby, but you're still with me in my dreams,
And tonight, it's only you and me."

There's a song called "Here Without You" by 3 Doors Down, which is one of mine and Hari's personal favourites. We first discovered it on YouTube, as it happens, through a machinima made in World of Warcraft which uses it as the main theme song, and it's stuck with us ever since.

The song is about missing a loved one, and while I listen to it a lot when Hari is around, if she's away I often find it really hard to listen to since I'm constantly reminded of her and it makes me miss her so much. It's a very moving song and it nearly had me in tears once when she was staying with her parents and I was on my own in Bradford. Often, if she's not around and iTunes randomly picks the song, I skip to something more upbeat.

Ramp: We're having Molten Core on Friday, you going to be there?
Hari: No, we're going out for a meal with friends and then going to the theatre.
Hexo: We are?
Hari: Yeah, I organised it in the pub last night - you were chatting about something else.
Hexo: Oh...

Me = Hexo.

And, just for luck, there are 545 results for "web 3.11 for workgroups". Some of you will get that joke.

Thanks to Boing Boing, I've now got a reasonably definitive list of faux pas, sorted by country. What is interesting is the differences between countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom; although we all essentially speak the same language there are some customs which are quite different.

Take tipping, for example. In Britain, it is customary to leave a small tip in restaurants, but this is usually no more than a few pounds and is usually discretionary. You put the tip in the tray that the bill arrives in, rather than giving it directly to the waiter. You generally don't tip when you pay at the bar, or in fast food outlets, and many restaurants include a 'service charge' which acts as a tip and may well be discretionary. Furthermore, if you don't tip, it isn't always seen as offensive, since the person serving you will be receiving the national minimum wage - tips are just extra.

I'm writing about this because it reminds me of when I was in London last year - Hari and I met up with Chris Romp in a pub near Tate Modern and when he ordered a round of drinks he offered a tip to the barmaid. This isn't done here; while it is polite to tip a waiter who comes to your table, to tip at the bar as unheard of. You may occasionally see people pay double for a drink and let the bar staff buy themselves a drink, but that's not particularly common either.

This compares drastically to what I've heard happens in the US - you're expected to tip around 15% of the bill and the person serving you will generally insist on being tipped. Brits are much more laid back about the whole thing, although this does vary as I imagine that you would be expected to tip in some classier places.

So... how do you tip where you come from?

• TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. SO I SHOULD REALLY DO THE REST OF THIS POST IN CAPS BUT I'LL SAVE YOU THE TORTURE.
• The final version of Firefox 2.0 is out on Tuesday, apparently. I really do like the new features and it's been getting some good reviews - it's even managed to steal Internet Explorer 7's fire somewhat. The new theme on OS X is starting to grow on me - originally I wasn't keen but I'm liking it more now that I'm used to it.
• Yesterday I revisited Assault on Thirteenth Labour, a grid computing project to crack an encrypted code on a card in the Perplex City set. I had used it some time ago (and was quite impressed at how it was able to run in Mono on OS X despite being developed for .Net on Windows) and wanted to see what progress has been made. It's still not cracked yet, and it proved a good opportunity to put my MacBook's second processor core to use for a while.
• Talking of recently revisited software, I gave Democracy player another spin. I don't tend to watch video podcasts so it's of little use to me, but it does have a nice interface and seems very easy to use. A new version has recently been released, too.
• My dad has now joined the iPod generation with the purchase of a 2 GB silver iPod Nano. He seems to like it but is having trouble filling it - he can't comprehend how someone can fill an 80 GB one, never mind 2 GB.
• The title of this post was created by Random Tabloid Headline Generator, by the way. I'm not a porn star and the devil didn't order me to smite thirty-five religious fundamentalists. And besides, I'd run out of lettuce.

Here's something I didn't know - Irn-Bru, a fizzy drink that is arguably more popular than water in its native Scotland, is, according to Wikipedia, banned in the US, because 2 of its ingredients have not been approved by the FDA. One of them is apparently carcinogenic, though, which may explain why.

Irn-Bru is the drink that famously held back McDonald's chain expansion in Scotland - Scots simply would not visit Maccy D's until Irn-Bru was available alongside Coke and the like. It has a place in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, alongside other more famous Scottish inventions such as the television.

Hi, my name is Neil, I'm 22 years old, and yesterday I ate my first Big Mac.

No really, it has taken me this long to get around to eating the burger that McDonalds are most famous for. It's not that I've been deliberately avoiding Big Macs, it's just that I've preferred other items on their menu, such as their McChicken Premiere, and McDonalds isn't somewhere I really frequent anyway. In fact, I'd be surprised if I've eaten there more than 10 times in my life, and the same would be true for places like Burger King and KFC.

Did I like it? It wasn't bad - I was quite hungry so on this occasion I appreciated the size but I'd usually go for something smaller.

Here's a joke lifted from an old episode of ISIHAC, credited to Jeremy Hardy (but helped along by Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and Tim Brooke-Taylor):

Snow White, Tom Thumb and Quasimodo were sat in a bar having a drink together. Snow White announced to the group, "Hey, I have this great thing to show you - it's a magic mirror, that you can ask questions to it'll speak the answers back to you!". The other two sound intrigued, so she speaks to the mirror and says, "Mirror, mirror, from my handbag, who is the fairest of them all?". The mirror replies, "Why, Snow White, you are the fairest of them all."

Tom Thumb says, "Wow, that's amazing! Can I try?". "Okay." said Snow White, and Tom Thumb proceeded to ask the mirror "Mirror, mirror, from Snow White's handbag, who is the smallest of them all?". "Why, Tom Thumb, you are the smallest of them all." it replied.

Snow White then turned to Quasimodo and said "Why don't you try?". He replied "I don't want to, I'll get all embarrassed." So Snow White then said "Well, why don't you go in the corner where we can't hear?". "Okay then", Quasimodo replied, and he took the mirror and went into the corner. A moment later, he returned, and said:

"Who on earth is Ann Widdecombe?"

• So, yesterday Hari met about 90% of my family, having previously only met my parents - daunting, but she coped. My family seems to approve of her though which is good. We'll have been dating for 10 months on Tuesday.
• While there, we saw our family's latest arrival - he's now 3 months old, and very cute. And yes, we know the irony of calling him Will Turner.
• MacBook was supposed to be shipping on Thursday, but it hasn't yet. Apple haven't charged me anything yet though so I suppose that's a good thing. Maybe they're bogged down with orders for Mac Pros - a computer that I don't really need and certainly can't afford, but by 'eck do I want one...
• While coming back to Bradford on the train today it was raining very heavily. The train was a rattly old thing and when I got up to get off at Bradford Interchange I found part of my right leg was soaked. I told the conductor that his train was leaking, to which the response was "Don't worry mate, it's leaking in the cab too - we've obviously run out of sticky tape...". Cue a comment from Hari saying "I knew you'd blog that...".
• Here's a Googlebomb for you - stick "git wizard" into Google and click "I'm Feeling Lucky". See, even Radio 4 listeners can have their fun.
• Tomorrow the university's preparations for Clearing get fully underway. We don't start taking calls until Thursday, when A-level results come out, so the next few days will be spent making sure everything's ready. This is the third year I've done it and I'm being treated essentially as a member of staff this time, which should prove interesting, since come Thursday I'm less sure what I'll actually be doing - it could be answering phones, being a supervisor or a bit of both. We'll see.

It's probably fair to say that things aren't looking too lively around here, considering it's been a whole 5 days since I posted anything at all here. As it happens, I've been rather busy and so blogging has taken something of a back seat of late.

It's also been 10 days since my last non-tech-related post, and since I know some of you tend to enjoy the non-techy stuff I'll stick a big life update in the extended portion of this entry. Hopefully I'll be blogging more soon but I can't promise anything.

Today the government reduced the number of terror threat levels to 5. Previously it was 7, and it now means we're closer to the US system. We did, however, choose different names.

I've therefore produced a guide to Brits wanting to know how to respond to the different terror alert levels. It consists of around 20 minutes work in MS Paint and some images stolen through Google Images. Yes, MS Paint. No really, MS Paint. Here it is in full size.

I do like this effort, though.

• First full week at work is over and so I have 35 hours under my belt - which should equate to something substantial when I get paid in a couple of weeks. It's not been especially interesting, but then it never has been - most of my time has been spent either stuffing envelopes, inputting data onto the student database system and photocopying. I don't mind the first two bits but the last bit is made difficult by the existence of the Evil Bitch Photocopier From Hell™, which seems to take one look at me and then jam itself. Thus copying anything always takes twice as long as you want or expect it to.
• The electricity supply to the whole of campus has been shut down today, so that two new buildings can be plumbed into the main fusebox, or something like that. By choosing a weekend in the middle of July the university is hoping that this will disadvantage as few people as possible, but it does mean there is no electricity anywhere on campus. This means that not only do all of the students in halls of residence have no electricity today, but all of the university's IT systems had to be shut down yesterday evening and won't be up until Monday morning. This includes the university web site, and student and staff email - thankfully most of my email now comes to my personal account, which is hosted along with this web site in Leicestershire (and has very little downtime). Though the shutdown has been planned since April or something, some smart fellow in university security only realised this week that turning the power would also de-activate the electromagnetic keycard locks on many of the doors around campus, so all academic buildings were locked manually (using good old keys) at 6pm last night. Hopefully nobody got locked in.
• We don't have major plans for this weekend. I think today is going to be quiet day - Hari is looking at doing The Ruins of Ahn'Quraj with her guild this afternoon and there's the finale of Doctor Who tonight, which I'll try to catch (or download if I don't). Tomorrow we're probably going to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 at the cinema, and maybe have dinner out somewhere for a change.
• Speaking of Hari and WoW, a tool called AV Voice Changer lets you change your voice when speaking on systems like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. It's aimed at female gamers who get intimidated by men on the system. This may have been useful for Hari in the past as another guild member told her to keep talking as her voice apparently made him "horny" - he was kicked from the guild shortly after. [Link via BoingBoing
• I'm at work all this week - I have a training course on Thursday morning, and then on Friday Hari and I are going down to her parent's house. I'm just staying the weekend but she's stopping there for a couple of weeks - one of her aunties is getting married and she has some things that need sorting out there. We're both going by train this time - we booked Hari's ticket on Thursday and by leaving Bradford at 19:30 we could get all the way there for only £12 - about the same price as a coach to Birmingham, even with a student discount, and that doesn't include a train fare for the last leg of the journey which can be up to £5. Just goes to show that booking in advance saves you money.

Nothing much interesting going on right now so I'm mostly blogging for the sake of filling space. And attempting to get people to comment - commenting is at a lull at the moment and I haven't had any decent comments in 36 hours (excepting spam and someone whose comment was 'I am a chinease' on an entry about ICQ numbers).

I started back at work yesterday - I'm now there essentially full time until September. It's good to see everyone again and to have something to do during the day - and the money isn't too bad either. I can't see myself wanting to do this as a career but I can think of much worse jobs I'd be doing.

I turned up to work wearing my 'Zombies Ate My Brain' t-shirt from the Artificial Duck Shop - well, okay, Dave2. I went for a 'small' since I tend to find the American medium to be a bit too large, but while the t-shirt fits it is quite skin-tight. Still, when I went in I had two people commenting that I looked liked I'd lost weight recently, which was nice although actually the opposite is true. However the office moved up two floors a few weeks ago so I have two extra flights of stairs to burn off calories on - we're now 5 flights up from the ground floor and I have to go up and down several times a day.

Dinner tonight was a tuna pasta bake, made with Homepride Tuna Pasta Bake Sauce. Which is notable because the sauce contains neither tuna nor pasta - it's really just glorified tomato purée. I wish I'd realised this before before buying it and instead bought a cheap tin of tomato purée for half the price.

We went to Tesco yesterday evening and spent a 3-figure sum on shopping. Admittedly the freezer is now almost full and I'll have enough food to last me a few weeks, but it's still a lot of money for a poor student to spend. Though admittedly over £30 of that was alcohol - we've discovered wine boxes and now have 6 litres of wine in the house. We also bought an electric fan for my room, which has been very welcome bearing in mind the temperature has remained above 30℉C in here during the daytime since Sunday.

The plan for the rest of the week? More work, and possibly a trip into town and a barbecue at the weekend - which I'm sure will be dull and wet just to annoy me since I've spent most of the past two days in a storeroom with no natural light. I may be going down to Hari's parents the weekend after - she has to go home for a couple of weeks (sob...) so I might spend that weekend with her.

And finally, the title of this entry is inspired by this song by Ferrino, Ferrino and Ferrino, aka Steve Coogan.

World Cup

I'm not going to say anything about a certain football game yesterday, other than to say I'll be supporting France for the rest of the tournament. Come on Henry!

House-Warming Party

A sign that my friends are getting older is the fact that I went to a house-warming party for one of them yesterday, in Leeds. The house, incidentally, was compact but nice, and with a large garden at the back. I'm sure the time will come when we have a house-warming party of our own but we're probably looking at summer 2008 at the earliest.

phpRaid

I'm hosting a copy of phpRaid for Hari's guild as a way of managing sign-ups for raids. They've previously used a copy on another server but the person hosting it recently left to join a rival guild and has since closed it down, so I've offered to pick up the baton. It's quite a nice system for managing raid sign-ups, and it also integrates with phpBB if needed. I'm also intending to allow the guild leaders to access database dumps in case I or Hari fall out with them for whatever reason, so as to avoid them facing the same problem again. It's not the first time something like this has happened to them - another guild member, who defected to the same rival guild, hosted their TeamSpeak server which he promptly shut down after leaving the guild.

Not Guildless

And as for my progress in WoW, I'm now in Hari's guild too. It feels a bit strange being there, since most of the players are level 55+ and they currently are not recruiting, but they're all very friendly and have been using their alternative characters to help me level up. I'm now at level 29, however I can't see myself playing as much now since I'm back in Bradford now and from tomorrow will be working every weekday. Also, neither me nor Hari have two computers capable of playing WoW so we either spend time together or play together but at each other's houses.

Inactivity

Over the past two weeks I haven't turned my laptop on at all, so when I put it on today as well as having McAfee and Windows Defender do scans I also had quite a bit of software to update - OpenOffice.org, ExtractNow, GnuPG, Windows Privacy Tray, iTunes, QuickTime, WinAmp, Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Live Messenger, all of which have been updated in the past couple of weeks. There were also updates to several of my Firefox extensions too.

We had a barbecue yesterday, and invited a few friends over. Due to our typical bad planning we only invited people the night before and so in the end only two people could make it, but it was good nonetheless and we got to use my parents' decent barbecue too. The weather wasn't that great though and by about half past eight we had retreated indoors since it was getting cold and looking like it was going to rain soon.

On WoW I'm up to level 24 - still no closer to completing my level 20+ Paladin quest but I did get my first honourable kill yesterday. My character, and Hari's gnome warlock alt character, were in The Barrens for one of her quests and got ganked by a group of 5 mid-level Horde characters (who then camped out to try and kill us again if we resurrected), so I stayed around as a ghost while she came back with her level 60 mage and killed them all in revenge. I managed to get a kill in there too. Felt quite satisfying, really, but unfortunately this is what happens when you play on a PvP (player vs player) server.

O'Reilly have sent me a glossy brochure inviting me to Euro OSCON in September, which is all well and good - 4 days and several interesting speakers, such as Rasmus Lerdorf, Tim O'Reilly and Louis Suarez-Potts - but at £200 for the student early-bird session-only entry price (the cheapest there is) I think it's too far beyond my budget. I'd also need to travel to Brussels and stay somewhere for 5 nights. In short, I'd love to, but I think I'd find buying a new laptop to be a better use of the money.

We haven't got any major plans for the rest of the week; will probably go into York one day and have a ride on the Yorkshire Wheel - York's answer to the London Eye - and do some shopping. On Saturday we're off to a house warming party and then next week I start work full-time for the summer. Fun.

My paladin is up to level 22 now. I'm in the middle of a really evil class-specific quest which requires gathering four items from various places - I got one from Deadmines and the others are scattered about, but involve killing several high level monsters. Looks like I'm going to be doing this one for a while. We also did Deadmines again last night, initially with 5 people but one left. We didn't wipe either, but then I wasn't the healer this time - we had a proper priest :) .

As for non-WoW related things - zombies have eaten my brain! Dave's awesome t-shirts finally arrived today and they look really good - I suppose I'll have to get a photo up soon.

Movable Type 3.3 Beta 3 is out - it now includes a cut-down version of Feeds.app as standard, plus a new configuration wizard that you can use the first time you install it. More details here - I'm still not yet ready to upgrade this site because of my reliance on certain plugins which will almost certainly break with it, but I will upgrade my local installation.

Finally, I have a scary fact for you. This year, I have had all of 20 legitimate trackbacks. On average, I delete double that amount of trackback spam every day, despite my best efforts at blocking it. I think it's probably about time I abandoned trackback here, or at least suspend it until there's better spam prevention mechanisms.

This blog's been mostly silent of late because I haven't really been up to much - other than playing WoW, obviously. My paladin is now up to level 20 and I did my first run of Deadmines last night with Hari's warlock, plus a warrior, mage and another paladin. Only two of the players died in the run, apart from at the end when we wiped on some murlocs after having killed the boss - which was partly my fault for not getting there in time to heal everyone. I've also been able to pick up some nice 'rare' quality items.

I signed up to ZDNet yesterday to comment on Ed Bott's blog, and despite ticking all of the boxes saying I didn't want to get emails from them it still subscribed me to two of their newsletters, which was rather annoying. I've been successfully unsubscribed from them but it really should have been more clear that I'd get these - especially as by the looks of things they're daily newsletters and thus generate a lot of email.

I don't necessarily mind getting email newsletters when i sign up to things - I get them from sites like Firebox and CD Wow - but I do want it made clear to me that I am going to be getting emails and be given the option to unsubscribe to all of them.

• Am I the only one who's not actually that interested in the fact that Bill Gates will be reducing his influence on MS in two years time? The tech news sites I read are full of it - article after article about Bill Gates this, Microsoft that...
• Off to the beach party in a couple of hours or so. Should be good - and I actually have working batteries for my camera. I'm getting some new 2500mAh rechargeable batteries via Battery Logic next week but for now I'm using long-life alkalines since my camera can be quite thirsty for juice at the best of times.
• By the looks of things the new home page design does indeed work in IE6 (woohoo!) even though I still haven't been able to test it myself, so I'll be rolling it out soon. It's not a final design though and is subject to change - I'm probably going to play around with the menu and maybe even change the logo (which has been the same for over 2 years now).
• We've been told by our ISP, PlusNet, that they're putting their upgrades to 8 Mbit DSLMax on hold for two months as it seems many of those who were upgraded were having erratic connections and fluctuating speeds (at least in the first week of operation) and so were taking up more of their support resources. Upgrades are now only happening if customers specifically request it, which we have. Apparently our distance from the telephone exchange means we're most likely to only get around 6 MBit and not the full 8, but it's still better than 2, and doesn't cost anything extra.

• Britain is to launch a new Mars probe, called Bridget, in 2011. It should also not suffer the same fate as Beagle 2 by being to land better. I think it says a lot about British eccentricity when we decide to call our space probes names like 'Beagle 2' and 'Bridget', whereas NASA go for pretentious names like 'Opportunity' and 'Spirit'. You could describe our space probes' names as being more 'down to earth', though being 'down to earth' is probably the last thing you'd want a space probe to be.
• I updated some software packages on my Mac yesterday, namely AppZapper and macam. Both have had minor updates recently.
• I also moved my test install of MT 3.3 up to beta 2. There's a couple of new plugins - StyleCatcher and Widget Manager now ship by default and the Google Search API stuff has been devolved to a plugin (which kinda makes sense since it's a rather peripheral feature), and obviously bug fixes. I've also found that with FastCGI you need to restart Apache when you upgrade, otherwise things get messy.
• The filming of a short video that I was supposed to be doing yesterday now won't be happening. Which is a bit of a shame. I'm doing it in writing and then having a photo taken instead, which is a little less grandiose but nevermind. It's only some promotional stuff for the university, probably not too dissimilar to this, but for my masters degree course.
• I've been pretty slack at collecting money for bills from my housemates, which is probably not a good thing since I pay all 5 bills (gas, electricity, phone, internet and TV license). Between the two of them, they owe me 10 months of bill money, or £377.26, according to my recently-concocted spreadsheet. This would explain why I have so little money right now.
• Hari's been quite interested in Goodie Bag TV, a site with a lot of amusing and/or strange videos. Note that some are NSFW.

• Had a good weekend - went to Leeds with Hari to have lunch with my parents. I also finally got my present from her - "The Young And The Hopeless" by Good Charlotte, and a Futurama DVD (Monster Robot Maniac Fun Collection). The CD is a bit old but I like the band, and although I have now seen every episode of Futurama (thanks to a former housemate) I don't have any of the DVDs myself.
• Tomorrow is my second exam - Digital Image Processing. It's also the one I'm most terrified of as I've struggled to understand a lot of the concepts in it. It assumes you have A-level Maths and Physics, which is sort-of true as I have the former and AS-level Physics, but it's been 4 years since I used them (and I wasn't much good at either of them anyway) so I'm finding it difficult. We'll see how I do, but thankfully I'm not the only one struggling with this module.
• Quite how the lecturers' strike will affect my exams remains to be seen. My first exam was set by an AUT lecturer, but he set the exam anyway as he wanted us to do well. Of the other four exams I have, three are for modules lead by striking lecturers (including the one tomorrow) so we'll see what happens. The exam I have on Friday (Internet Security and Protocols) was set by the same module leader as one last Friday (for a module I don't take) and that exam was set by someone else, which the lecturer was none too happy about.
• On the plus side, at 5pm a week tomorrow, all my exams will be over. A drinking session has been planned.
• On Wednesday I'm doing a group presentation on forensic analysis of portable devices. While my other group members are concentrating on PDAs and mobile phones, my area is portable media players, so I've been working on ways of recovering data from my iPod. It's actually pretty simple - in fact, no more complex than a normal hard drive. So don't use your iPod for storing child pornography, unless you are particularly keen to go to prison.

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes over the past couple of days - I had quite a good birthday but most of my presents aren't coming until tomorrow. Not entirely sure what I'm getting but I think they will mostly be vouchers for driving lessons.

I'm having a brief experiment with Trackback. A while ago I removed the block of code that allows other weblogs to discover the trackback URL and post to it, in an effort to reduce trackback spam. This turned out to be very successful, making the trackback problem almost non-existant, however since then I've been getting almost no trackbacks at all which makes the feature almost useless. So I've re-added it, but now I'll only be opening trackback on a handful of entries (with it off by default). I'll see if I start getting more pings this way, or if the spam problem becomes intolerable again.

I'm looking at alternatives to trackback, such as getting data from Technorati and displaying a list of blogs that link to that entry, but I'd like to give trackback another chance before I give up on it.

I appreciate the fact that I have neglected this blog for 4 days now - my excuses being a lack of things to blog about and me being generally away from computers of late. Generally things have been okay, but here's what I've been up to of late:

• Yesterday I went on a hike around Hardcastle Crags, near Hebden Bridge. Though the weather wasn't great, it was a nice walk, and the proximity of Hebden Bridge meant a large selection of good pubs to end up in - the university hiking club do have a knack for ending hikes in good pubs. I didn't take my camera since the batteries were flat, so no photos I'm afraid.
• On Saturday, I went to see the premiere screening of Riot! The Musical, a final year student media production which featured some of my friends as actors. It was being shown at Pictureville, one of the cinemas attached to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, so we were able to see it on the big screen. It was hilarious, though the editing was rather blunt - I've since heard that this wasn't the final version and it's due for more editing before being formally submitted, or something.
• Today I'm off to get my provisional driving license. My driving lessons start on June 19th, which should be interesting. I'm also intent on starting a few more job applications this week.
• This week is the last week of term, making my Friday my last lecture ever (probably). I have an exam tomorrow, but as it's open-book and last year no-one failed the module I'm not stressing too much about it. I also have one final piece of coursework to do and one more presentation.
• And my birthday is now 10 days away. :)

Today is council election day for many of the local council wards in England. Mine was up for election, and I've just got back from voting. I voted Liberal Democrat in the end, but was also considering voting Green. Labour and the Conservatives were also standing - I'm not too happy with Labour right now and never been very happy with the Conservatives, and in any case the Conservative candidate lived in Leeds, not in central Bradford which is the area the ward covers.

If you're registered to vote, I do hope you turn out to vote, and that you use your vote wisely.

Something that Hari will testify is that I never seem to have the first series in any of my DVD sets. For example, I have:

• Kill Bill vol. 2, but no vol 1
• Men In Black 2, but no Men in Black
• Matrix Reloaded, but no The Matrix (or Matrix Revolutions for that matter)
• Blackadder The Third, but no Blackadder 2 or Blackadder (I have Blackadder Goes Forth on VHS)
• Harry Potter 2, 3 and 4, but not the first one
• Coupling series 2 and 3, but no series one (I didn't like series 4 so I probably won't be buying it)
• Doctor Who parts 2, 3 and 4, but not part 1 (though I am considering buying it)

Until recently, I did have the first two series of Red Dwarf, however I have since bought them and now I have all 8 series (a fact that officially makes me a geek, I think). I also have all 3 Lord of the Rings films, though they were a box set (just the normal ones, not the extended versions - 9 hours is enough as it is), the first three Family Guy DVDs (will get around to ordering season four when it's a bit cheaper), and both Shrek films and both Spiderman films.

By the way, May 25th is my birthday (about 3 1/2 weeks away). I've put some of these items on my Amazon Wishlist, so if you fancy purchasing something for me please do. The cheapest items start at under £4 (plus delivery).

There's been lots of these 'top 10 signs that you are a geek', but here's a few that a friend forwarded to me that I hadn't heard before...

• You greet fellow geeks by saying "SYN!" and they respond with "ACK!".
• You think of shopping as a series of SQL statements - select maple_syrup from home_baking_aisle.
• You still check your mail using pine over an SSH connection.
• All of the software on your computers is open source. And you compiled it all yourself. And contributed code to at least half of them.
• You spend Friday nights on IRC, discussing the merits of token networks over ethernet.
• Your IRC client is called Telnet.
• All of your t-shirts have geeky slogans such as "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" on them.
• You have more Firefox extensions than you have had girlfriends (or boyfriends).
• You can hold conversations in Perl.
• You can understand OpenOffice.org's source code in its entirity.
• You know what TWAIN stands for. Really.

I know I'm guilty of one of those. How about you people, and do you have any other suggestions?

No, it doesn't really exist - it was made using the For Dummies Book Cover Generator. You can, however, buy Ballet for Dummies, if that kind of thing floats your boat.

This is Digbeth Coach Station. If you arrive in Birmingham by National Express coach, this is where you'll end up. As you can see from the picture above, it's highly depressing.

It's a rather unglorified shed, with a dirty corrugated iron roof and painted concrete floor. It doesn't give a good first impression of Birmingham, which is now very much on the up. You'd think that with all of the nice new architecture being put into the centre of the city that they'd do something here, but obviously not. But then Birmingham New Street is also quite depressing and dark too.

Still, if Bradford can manage a reasonably good coach station then why can't Britain's second-largest city?

Anyway, yes, I arrived safely at Hari's parents house yesterday.

• Life's been rather busy of late, what with the double whammy of women's week and no smoking day yesterday, including watching two performances of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues. I think I know the Vagina Happy Fact off by heart now.
• Tonight I have what looks to be a marathon of a student union meeting and tomorrow I'm heading up to the Lake District with the hiking club for a weekend away. Consequently, things may get a little quiet around here. The server move is also happening tonight.
• As of Wednesday next week, Hari and I will have been seeing each other for 5 months. And this weekend will be the first time in 2 months where we haven't stayed over together. It's only for two nights though.
• The latest news with regards to the campus terror arrests is that one of the students arrested off-campus has been charged, along with another fellow who turned himself in a few days ago. Of those arrested in halls of residence, one has been released without charge and the other two are still being questioned by police. All students were emailed a statement from the department of marketing and corporate communications on Tuesday with the university's official response to the arrests. Yesterday's open day was also very quiet, as I predicted on Monday. 'I predict a quiet', if you will.
• When I do get some free time, I'll have quite a bit of software to update. µTorrent has been updated to include protocol encryption, and OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 is out. Despite the version number it does introduce a number of new features, such as support for MS Word 2 and Quattro Pro 6 files, interface enhancements (especially on Linux) and better mail merge.

Here's something that Jake may find somewhat amusing - the CIA World Factbook lists the UK as being "slightly smaller than Oregon". So you can fit a country that is home to over 60 million people inside one US state whose own population doesn't even top 3.5 million.

And yet the UK isn't particularly overcrowded (despite what some right-wing politicians may tell you). We still have large areas of open countryside and places were only a handful of people live. That must mean that Oregon is very sparsely populated.

incidentally the whole of the UK would fit into Texas twice over with room to spare.

Other useful facts that you can pick up from the UK's CIA World Factbook entry is that the full title of our country (as is printed on the cover of our passports) is "United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland". But it's generally just known as the "United Kingdom" or just "UK". I've never seen it called "UKGBNI" before.

• As well as the terrorism issue, the university have more fun tomorrow in the form of a strike by lecturers belonging to the AUT union, which will lead to a lot of lecture cancellations, though admittedly most universities are affected by this. Fortunately for me it means I have tomorrow morning off so I'm free to go out tonight for a change.
• Came across a potentially useful program called DriverCleaner which removes the remnants of graphics drivers. You only really need it if you are doing a major upgrade to your drivers or have bought a new card and want to remove the old drivers that may be left over. It's free but there's a 'platinum' version that you can buy too.
• For some reason, the MailScanner system on this server has stopped working. MailScanner incorporates SpamAssassin with a virus filter, and I have it set to discard all virus-infected emails and any emails that it thinks are almost certainly spam (those that get a low SpamAssassin score are still delivered to my inbox, albeit with a modified subject line). Because it's not working, I'm getting lots of virus-infected emails and more than my usual serving of spam, which is a bit annoying.
• If you're a Movable Type user, here's a fix to a bug in Movable Type 3.2 which makes the comment submission process much, much faster. This should mean that if you comment here, the page will load much quicker. And the fix merely consists of one extra line of code in one file.

Since I've been blogging quite a bit about the Royal Mail's customer service at the Bradford South depot, or rather the lack thereof, I thought I'd say something about some good customer service that Hari had today. Her World of Warcraft subscription needed renewing and she hadn't paid, so her account was cut off as a result. She paid this morning but for some reason nothing happened, so she sent Blizzard Entermtainment Europe an email.

She got a response about three hours later, from an actual person. There'd been some problems processing her payment details, so Blizzard had decided to give her a free one-day extension to her subscription so that she could continue to play until it was sorted.

It may not seem like much but it was a kind gesture and Hari had been rather desperate to play on WoW today as she had the day off.

Over at Lemon Garden there's a link to this tool on MyHeritage.com that lets you upload an image of yourself and have it tell you which famous people you most look like. I uploaded the following image of me:

And here were the results, in order of relevance:

1. L. Ron Hubbard (56%)
2. Rudy Giuliani (54%)
3. Edward Norton (53%)
4. Haley Joel Osment (53%)
5. Tom Welling (51%)

Considering how little regard I have for the Church of Scientology, I wasn't so happy to hear that I look like L. Ron Hubbard but to be honest I don't really which is probably why it's only a 56% match. I hadn't heard of the people who came 3rd, 4th and 5th, though I suppose I do look a bit like Haley Joel Osment. Even though he's almost 4 years younger than me. So, who do you all look like?

Note that the site asks you to register, but you don't have to - just close the registration window when it pops up. You'll only get one match though, apparently.

• According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of the word 'malarkey' is unknown. Which is a shame as it's such a brilliant word. Sadly it wasn't included in the recent BBC Wordhunt.
• The Microsoft presentation yesterday was interesting as expected. Essentially it focussed on how Microsoft is 'opening up', through its Office XML in Office 2007 and through its shared source initiative, but it also criticised the GPL for being too restrictive, in that if you have to provide source code and the right to modify it with your software, how do you expect to be able to make money? Still, it was interesting and we got a demonstration of Office 2007, plus a slightly technical look at Office XML files, and the demonstrator's copy of IE6 did crash in the process. Usually when MS demonstrate something here something goes wrong and obviously today was no exception. I also got a free pen and a few students won some free MS software.
• The student union elections are just over 3 weeks away with the candidates being confirmed at the end of this week. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but I'm not personally standing for a position. I did last year (and came third), though I didn't post anything much here about it (mainly because of the election regulations saying I couldn't). A few people I know are standing though, so it could be nice to be able to help people with their campaigns rather than run one myself. A bit like being a grandparent instead of a parent - when the situation gets a bit sticky, you can hand it back.
• Winamp 5.2 is out. It's not on the main site yet, but you can download it from the forums. It adds portable music player and an improved media library, so you can use your iPod or Zen with it without installing extra plugins. Seems to work well on my machine.
• What doesn't seem to work well here is the latest version of the drivers for my Intel Extreme Graphics. The control panel icon is now called 'Can't find requested string.' and it doesn't do anything when you click on it. Whoops.
• Six Apart have set up the Trackback Working Group, to have Trackback approved as an IETF standard (like Atom was) and sort out its numerous flaws (namely to do with internationalisation and spam). Like with Atom it's being done through a Wiki, which you need a LiveJournal account or OpenID server to login to. Best of luck to them and I've joined their mailing list as an interested party.
• And finally, I have 4 only 1 more invitation to download the beta of Windows Live Messenger, the successor to MSN Messenger 7.5. Drop me a line if you would like to try one - I'll need the email address you use for your Microsoft .Net Passport.

Yet again, I've let this blog go silent. This time I'm blaming Telewest, Hari's ISP, because her internet has been very flaky all week and keeps going up and down like a yo-yo. Despite Telewest claiming to have fixed it on Friday, it was still broken this morning.

I was also away all Saturday in London, and spent most of yesterday in bed recovering as a result. Not that London's particularly stressful, it's just that getting up at 6am and not going to bed until midnight does take it out of you.

Today I have a presentation from Kevin McDaniel, the head of Microsoft's UK Academic Programme. His presentation is entitled "Interoperability - Open Standards and/or Open Source", and we are to "come prepared to debate!". Should be interesting - I'll let you know if it is.

This week is a relatively normal week, though I'm doing more (paid) work than normal this week, which should mean I get some much needed cash. This includes working most of Saturday, but thankfully my course isn't being too demanding at the moment so I can cope for now. Thursday also sees the start of the annual student union elections, and though I'm not standing as a candidate this time I will probably be supporting some of my friends who are considering standing.

Well, okay, he didn't actually kill the man he accidently shot (though he did have a heart attack), but you can download the song "Dick Is A Killer" from The Party Party. It's a song using various samples of George W. Bush's speeches mixed up to comic effect.

A very quick 'things that have happened to me lately' summary:

• Went out for a belated Valentines' Day lunch with Hari yesterday - we went to Salts Diner at Salts Mill in Saltaire. Wasn't cheap but we managed to stuff ourselves and it was very enjoyable.
• Finally got around to asking my housemates for money towards bills - I'm now owed about £200...
• Booked to go to a conference in London on Saturday.

And for Mac users, OS X 10.4.5 is out, with some bug fixes, mostly for Intel-based Macs. iTunes 6.0.3 has also been released with "stability and performance improvements".

I realise that I haven't posted much at all this week and I do apologise for that. I've just been very busy lately and haven't had the time to blog.

This weekend I'm at my parents' house in York with Hari - we did a spot of shopping today (bought a few CDs and lots of cheap chocolate from the Cadbury's Factory Shop). On Wednesday I was back in Manchester, this time for a graduate fair. There weren't many employers there and most were offering managerial positions, though I have since made a job application to one of the companies that was there. The job sounds good and has good pay, even if they are not specifically targeting graduates and it has very little to do with forensic computing.

My course is going okay - I'm now finished the second week of the second semester. The 4 new modules I have all seem interesting, though my hopes of learning PhotoShop have been dashed somewhat since we're using a program that the lecturer wrote instead. Which sucks so badly that I've taken to modifying some of the resources using Resource Hacker - things like redesigning the dialogue boxes and adding keyboard shortcuts for menu items.

I do have some entries to write for next week - reviews of IE7, Songbird and AppZapper are on the way, plus any other general randomness. Hopefully I'll actually be able to find time to post them.

• Another big reason why I haven't been writing much here is that I've been staying over at Hari's house quite a bit lately, and with her only having one computer and one network socket in her room means I can't really do much there. If she continues to play World of Warcraft as much as she is right now (she's up to level 47) then in future I'll take my laptop over and buy a network switch for her room.
• We're going to the cinema tonight. We haven't decided what to see yet, but Hari wants to see Memoirs of a Geisha having read and enjoyed the book. We've seen Narnia and I'm not so sure if I like the rest of what's on.
• Tomorrow I'm going hiking, either to Whernside (if we can get a driver) or around Baildon (if we can't, since Baildon is reachable by train). The weather forecast isn't great but it shouldn't rain hopefully.
• My Flickr photostream is looking a bit empty and for that I apologise. I do have photos that I need to process and upload but I haven't really had the time. Some are from Manchester, others are just general ones from around Bradford and I'm sure I'll take some more tomorrow, wherever we end up.

I'm sorry for the recent lack of entries here. I had written some to post but ending up deleting them prior to posting, mostly because I was afraid of offending or alienating people or because I had not been able to make my arguments clear. All of them related to recent controversial political events that I feel strongly about.

The most recent one was about freedom of speech, and how I believe in its responsible use. Writing or posting things that are intended to incite hatred against people is wrong in my opinion and that was what the entry was about, citing a couple of very recent events in the news. Alas, I don't think I've been able to articulate myself in a way that firmly puts across my opinion and so I've felt it was best not to post them.

I will, however, be posting some less controversial stuff soon. Sorry for the interlude.

• I'm now two days into the second semester of my course, and have had sessions in 3 of the 4 new modules that I take up. One of them relates to statistical analysis of data, specifically crime data, and the other two are computer graphics related. The first seems to be a crash course in using PhotoShop for enhancing images for processing and the other is writing OpenGL applications in C++. We've never done C++ before (only Java) so we're starting from scratch, though I think allocating 2 hours for writing a "Hello Word" application is a bit excessive.
• We ended up in Manchester on Friday. Did a bit of shopping and then came home - nothing special but it was nice to have a day out away from Bradford. I was at work on Saturday and Sunday was a lazy day.
• The laptop now has its new owner and I re-installed Windows XP on it on Saturday night. It took the best part of 2 hours to get ready - installing XP itself, then service pack 2 and then all the updates afterwards - but it boots up faster than it did prior to the reinstall and seems generally snappier. Although as more programs are installed computers do slow over time, with this laptop being rather underpowered the slowing was much more noticable.
• I got my first item of credit card junk mail through the post today. I see this as a sign that my credit rating must be improving, though I'm probably wrong. I'm not going to change my card though - although my current one has a very low credit limit and high interest rate, in the 9 months I've had it I've only used it 3 times and always paid off the full balance within the first month so I don't really need a better one. Sure, I may be offered a good rate on balance transfers, but I have no balance to transfer.
• On the computeriness front, AppZapper sounds interesting. On a Mac, uninstalling a program is no more complex than dragging its icon to the Trash, but this only uninstalls the program itself and not any of its associated user data files, caches and scripts. While this is often no worse than most Windows uninstallers, AppZapper will scan your computer for additional files and offer to remove them along with the program. It's all wrapped up in what looks like a simple and attractive interface. Lifteime registration is $13 USD but the trial lets you remove 5 apps. Could be useful.

Since the Euromillions jackpot topped £100 million on Friday, I decided to buy myself a couple of tickets, on the off-chance that the 25,312,500,000 to 1 odds of me winning the jackpot would go my way. Obviously it didn't, as no-one won, but I got an email today (since I play online) that I had actually won something. I'm now an amazing £8.90 richer. Woo.

(And yes, I definitely checked it was the real National Lottery who sent the email. It was the correct web site and the correct SSL certificate)

With next week's jackpot an estimated £125 million, I'm playing again. If I were to be the sole winner I'd be one of the 400th richest people in the country, though to be honest I'd probably leave to avoid the publicity and begging letters that I'd no doubt get.

Hari commented earlier that I hadn't done one of these in a while, and since I'm a little uninspired post-wise right now it can help fill up some blogging quota :) .

• My exams are over! I had my last one yesterday, which went quite well. It was about cryptography, and 25% of the paper was on SHA-1, which was unexpected but I think I got it mostly right. Today I also had a presentation which mostly went okay..
• Hari and I went out for an early evening meal tonight, and we both managed to stuff ourselves silly. I felt incredibly bloated for about half an hour after eating. I'm now in a computer lab in the university while she's next door rehearsing for a play. It's in March but I gather there's a lot to be done over the next 6 weeks.
• Tomorrow we're going out somewhere for the day - either Leeds or Manchester - just really to have a day off and away from Bradford. Though I generally like Bradford, it's often good to get away sometimes too.
• If you were hoping that I'd be selling my Dad's old laptop on eBay sometime soon then I'm afraid I already have a buyer, so I'll be spending the next couple of days re-installing Windows on it. It's going to a friend of mine, who I trust quite a lot, so I won't need to properly wipe the hard disk first (which will take ages).
• I'm being told by 123-reg (with whom neilturner.org.uk is registered) that I cannot afford not to register neilturner.eu, as apparently I need to ensure that my brand is protected. At £15 upfront, plus a £15 fee for the first year (and every year after that), I think I'll pass and let some other Neil Turner register it if they really want to.

One thing you see a lot of around Bradford is young men driving around in souped up small cars with really loud stereos, usually playing either r'n'b, bhangra or drum'n'bass or something.

But today someone was driving around in a small car with his stereo turned up, with BBC Radio 4 on. Bradford must be getting more cultured.

• I've been rather busy lately, hence the relative silence on here. I'll try to post more frequently in future, if I can.
• The exam on Monday was, um, interesting. It was probably the hardest exam I've ever sat, and I'm not very confident about passing it. Thankfully I wasn't the only one who had problems. I still have to exams to sit, the next being on Friday, but I'm considerably more confident about those.
• Hari and I have now made it to 3 months, as of Sunday, though as I had revision to do (and coursework as well, as it transpired) we went out on Saturday instead. We went to the Bradford branch of Nando's (a chain of Portuguese chicken restaurants) for dinner before going to see The Chronic -what? -cles of Narnia which is a superbly amazing film that you absolutely must see - preferably on the big screen. The special effects are amazing and it rarely deviates at all from the original book.
• It wasn't planned, but Valentines Day is the day before our 4 month 'anniversary'. I've already bought Hari's present and I'm having a really hard time not telling her about it. It's nothing to do with World of Warcraft before you ask. She's level 38 now.
• My parents now have their PVR. Although the software on it seems to hang sometimes, they seem to be very pleased with it, especially the video quality. On Monday they were attempting to record two things and watch a third all at the same time, but I haven't spoken to them since to see if it actually worked.

A few hours ago I found out that two assignments which I didn't think were in until Monday 23rd Jan are actually due in tomorrow. Neither was complete, so I've spent the time in a mild panic trying to get them finished in time. This has included the realisation that I need graph paper, which would be a problem as it's a Sunday night outside term-time so there's nowhere local selling it, but thankfully the internet saves the day with some downloadable PDFs of graph paper.

Oh yeah, and I have a must-pass exam tomorrow as well. But thankfully it's not until 4pm so I at least have some time to do the last-minute revision that I was hoping to do tonight.

Anyway, back to work. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend, I'm sure I won't...

Update: And they're done - not the greatest assignments ever but since they're only worth 1 credit each (out of 180 for the course) I'm not too worried. Time for bed, ready for some hot revision action tomorrow.

At about 6 minutes past 5pm on the 14th January 2002, I wrote this entry. 4 years, 4821 entries, 6689 comments, 757 trackback pings and a whole shedload of spam later and it's my fourth blogiversary.

Four years is a, to put it bluntly, a bloody long time, and I'm really pleased that I've been able to keep it going this long. So many of my projects in the past have come and go - this is one that I've managed to stick with and it makes me proud to think it's still going strong. I have no intentions of giving up now.

Most of all, I'd like to thank all of you who have commented and trackbacked over the years, especially people like Andy, Kim, Ben, Richy and Ciaran who have been commenting here almost from the beginning. It's the feedback I get, more than anything, that keeps me going, so keep it up and I should still be here in another 4 years time :) .

The blog has also been with me through some interesting times. Back in January 2002 I was a 17-year-old college student. Since then I've had my 18th and 21st birthdays, left home, been to university, got a degree and started another one, met Hari and visted lots of new places, met lots of new people and done many new things. I can't guarantee that my life will stay interesting but at least if it doesn't I have a good record of when it was.

And the blog itself has changed - back in 2002, there were no comments, trackbacks or RSS feeds, and I was posting using Blogger to some webspace that only had 100MB of monthly bandwidth. Now I use 100MB in about 6 hours, the site is powered by Movable Type, and I've graduated from RSS to Atom for all my feeds. I also started the sideblog in November 2003 which has been doing well too, despite a few quiet periods.

I don't regret starting this blog one bit - through it, I've made many new friends and got a lot of enjoyment. Here's to another 4 years! :)

Previous anniversary posts: 2003, 2004 and 2005 (when I nearly forgot).

Someone on blackplanet.com was hotlinking an image on my server. Unfortunately for him, the filename for this file is 'familyguypoppycock.png'. His host obviously doesn't like the work 'cock', so I've had lots of 404 errors for the file 'familyguypoppy*bleep*.png'.

While you can't save files with asterisk characters in them, you can create redirects in Apache from an URL with asterisks to another file, so he's now getting a file called 'bigbandwidthstealer.png' instead.

Honestly, if you're going to steal peoples' bandwidth, at least do it properly... ;)

...could they donate it to me so that I could buy myself a Apple MacBook Pro? It looks absolutely awesome, and that's just the technical specs - 4x faster than the previous PowerBook.

The new iMac looks pretty good too - I know someone who bought one only a few weeks ago and who is probably sick as a parrot right now. I'd consider the iPod Radio Remote but you need either an iPod Nano or iPod with video, so it won't work with my iPod Mini :( . No new iPods announced today though interestingly - I was expecting an update to the iPod Shuffle line.

Still, the iToast is worth considering...

Update: Gah. Just did some maths - £1799 = $3176. So us Brits are paying $1176 more than our US counterparts :( . Even when adding 17.5% for VAT it comes to $2349. Same problem in Europe, it would seem. I thought Apple had put its rampant EU price inflation behind it, but looks like I'm wrong :-/ .

For the new iMac, it's £929 = $1640, as opposed to the US price of $1299, or $1526 with VAT, which isn't so bad. But still...

Update II: Aha! Apple have already lowered the price down to £1429 for the MacBook Pro, which is $2519. Still quite a bit more expensive but it's progress.

I have to say that I am quite impressed at the adoption of HDTV in the UK right now. Statistics show that in the run up to Christmas, a quarter of all TVs sold were 'HD-ready', in that if hooked up to a tuning device capable of receiving HD broadcasts, they would be able to ouput in high definition.

I know that HD is becoming big in the US, but (and correct me if I'm wrong), my understanding was that this was down to major differences in the TV system used over there. In the UK and Europe, we use the PAL system, which displays 576 visible lines, as opposed to the US and Japan's NTSC system which is only capable of 480 visible lines, this reducing picture quality. We've then had the move to digital television, which started in earnest in the late nineties and now means that the majority of households have at least one digital receiver, either through cable, satellite or terrestrial. With this, came a switch to widescreen (i.e. 16:9 aspect ratio as opposed to 4:3) and now a lot of screens sold today are widescreen, with channels like BBC One having broadcast shows in widescreen since 1997. As well as bringing more channels, digital television brought improved picture and sound quality, though the number of lines stayed the same.

I've made a point about mentioning this because digital TV already supplies a lot of the benefits that HD does - widescreen, better picture and better sound. In the past, consumers haven't adopted a format that isn't substantially better than what was currently on offer - we still buy audio CDs instead of DVD Audio or Super Audio CDs, for example. Yet we don't buy video or audio cassette types because audio CDs and DVDs offered better sound (and picture), better ease of use, smaller size and more features - a clear advantage.

And yet HD does actually seem to be taking off here, even if there are no HD broadcasts being made as yet (Sky will start later this year though). HD will improve picture quality even more than digital television has, but the benefits over digital TV aren't as great as over analogue NTSC, for example. I suppose the electronics companies and retailers have learned how to ensure that HD is successful, such as making the equipment readily available early and demonstrating its benefits, and the fact that any new equipment should also work fine with existing non-HD equipment. But I'm stull slightly surprised at its take-up, especially as we're still migrating from analogue to digital, never mind from digitial to digital HD.

Despite the first HD broadcasts being made this year, the big switch is unlikely to be made this decade. From what I've read, terrestrial HD services will not start until the analogue terrestrial signal is switched off, which will not be completed until 2012. Most people get digital television through an aerial, so even if Sky and NTL get their acts together HD broadcasts will probably not be in the majority of households for another ten years or so, by my reckoning. But HD has made a surprisingly good start here so I could be wrong.

HDTV UK is a blog tracking consumer HD news in the UK so I'll be subscribing to that.

One problem with having a name like Neil Turner is that I'm not the only one. Neil is quite a common first name and Turner is quite a common surname, so there are plenty of other Neil Turners out there. Here are some of the other Neil Turners on the web:

• To start with, there's neilturner.co.uk - not much there except a rather scary green face and a few photos.
• The Neil Turner at dg28.com is a photographer, and quite a good one at that - certainly better than this Neil. His archives are well worth a browse.
• The people of Wigan are represented by Neil Turner MP. I'm not sure if the bit about the elephants is true though.
• I'm also not the only Neil Turner who is interested in web usability - my namesake from London wrote this article on SitePoint about web pages that open new windows. He works for Webcredible, a consultancy on such things.
• There's a member of staff at Brunel University called Neil Turner. And funnily enough he's involved in Computing. I'm starting to detect a trend here.
• Should I ever go into writing software as a business I may need to be a little more original with the name for my company, as Neil Turner Software is already taken. That said, they mostly seem to concentrate on web site deisgn and hosting.
• Here's another namesake web designer, though his work isn't quite so impressive.
• And another, Neil Turner Freelance, based in Newcastle.
• On a completely different note, here's Professor Neil Turner at the University of Edinburgh. He's a professor of Nephrology.
• Neil's Place is home to a retired teacher in Annapolis, Maryland, USA.
• Neil Turner Events is a company in Australia, though their site is under construction.

When I came home 3 weeks ago, it was the first time I'd brought most of my clothes back with me since Easter, during which time I've amassed additional garments. Trying to fit all of this in my drawers and wardrobe at home became somewhat of a challenge, so today I had a clear-out of clothes that I no longer wear or that don't fit. This came to:

• 7 t-shirts
• 6 shirts
• 3 jumpers
• 5 pairs of trousers
• 1 coat

These will all be going to a local charity shop sometime soon. There was another pair of trousers that won't, on the basis that it had that many holes in it that it wasn't really fit for anyone. That'll be going to a textile bank for recycling.

I also found some clothes that I hadn't seen for years which still fitted, including a pair of jeans that are probably 4 or 5 years old that fit almost perfectly. I'm guessing they get relegated to the back of my wardrobe because they were too big for me at the time, or because I was starting to lose favour with jeans in favour of khaki trousers with big pockets.

It's great to be able to go away for a couple of days and come back to find a real conversation developing in the comments. One thing I've been trying to encourage is making comments into a conversation - in other words, making it easier for people to come back and post follow-up comments. Every entry has a web feed for comments, and you can also subscribe to email notifications of any new comments, either when you post or by clicking one of the links on the sidebar (could do with making this more obvious). There's also the recent comments feed which has the latest published comments across all entries on the blog.

As for where I've been these past couple of days - I went to see Hari again and stayed the night at her parents' house. I'll next see her back in Bradford on Wednesday - I'm returning myself on Sunday.

This will be my last post for this year. I hope you all enjoy the arrival of the new Gregorian year and that you have a happy and prosperous 2006. Onto some bullet points...

• I replaced the CMOS battery in my dad's old laptop today. We're due to sell it soon and the CMOS battery has died, so it won't remember settings between boots. On a modern computer this actually isn't much of a problem - it just takes slightly longer to detect the hardware and has to correct the time and date on each bootup - but since it produces an error message each time it's not really in a state to sell to someone. Replacing it was quite straightforward once I'd worked out where it actually was - underneath the fan unit, as it happens. It takes the same battery (CR2025) as my dad's scientific calculator.
• I also downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger), ready to install on my laptop. It's to replace Hoary Hedgehog which I haven't used for in ages and have forgotten the password for. I'll let you know what it's like.
• I made another minor design change today. If you are not using OpenID or TypeKey and you save your details, you should get a small welcome message above the comments box. I'll make the PHP code available if anyone is interested in deploying it on their own sites - I think it's quite cool.
• My parents have ordered a PVR - Personal Video Recorder, like a Tivo or Sky+ box. This one has two Freeview tuners in it, allowing you to watch one programme while recording another. It has an 80GB hard drive and can record at least 40 hours of TV. Although they have NTL cable, most of what they record on VHS now is on the Freeview channels and NTL haven't announced their PVR system yet. We looked at DVD recorders but a PVR would be more suitable since most of the stuff they record tends to get watched once and then taped over.
• We watched the film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy today. I'd made the mistake of also seeing some of the episodes of the BBC TV series beforehand. Personally I think the TV series is better, mainly because I generally prefer the acting (though Zooey Deschanel's Trillian is an improvement in my mind) but also because the story differs somewhat. Having also read the book and listened to the original radio series, I was expecting the same storyline, but bits have been changed or left out, which was slightly disappointing. All in all it was a good film but I'm not sure if it would have been worth paying for.
• And talking of films, we didn't see Narnia on Wednesday - it was sold out. We saw The Producers instead, which I thoroughly enjoyed. If you can, see it - it's hilarious.

Me: not a big fan of champagne first thing in the morning personally
Me: tastes rather bitter
Hari: LOL
Hari: in the morning??
Me: dude i sound so middle class when i say that
Hari: lol thats cos u are
Me: true
Me: but i don't like to show it off too much

So now you know.

Probably about time I posted my annual Christmas Message, so:

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Since it's about 9am here we've opened our presents here already - I've got:

• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (film) DVD
• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (BBC TV series) DVD
• Cocktail shaker and two cocktail glasses
• Hiking boots
• 5 small bottles of Absolut vodka
• A bottle of Cockspur rum and a bottle of Diaquiri cocktail mix
• Limoncello nougart
• Green & Blacks organic dark chocolate
• 2 tubs of Cadbury's Heroes
• A fawn-coloured Next long-sleeved t-shirt
• A black zip-up top
• A Van Heusen silk tie (in a posh box)
• A black Mulberry shirt
• Some Lindt chocolate Reindeer and a chocolate Santa
• A box of Hazer Baba Turkish Delight
• Some House of Commons dark chocolate
• ...and a bottle of Fentimans Curiosity Cola

In other words, I'll be sat watching DVDs wearing some new clothes and hiking boots, eating chocolate and getting drunk on cocktails :) .

Anyway, for those of you who celebrate Christmas (in whatever way you choose), I hope you have an enjoyable and happy day. :)

• One thing I've done a lot of since coming home on Sunday is sleep, including an 11 hour stint last night. With no early starts due to lectures, and no late night socialising, it's been the perfect chance to catch up on 13 weeks of sub-standard rest.
• I may have mentioned them before but if you're into Indie music, check out Kill The Young - I saw them play in Bradford a few weeks ago, and they're quite good, especially their single 'Origin of Illness' (the song that plays when you visit the site). I've also been into the Arctic Monkeys lately, but then they're not exactly unknown, what with having a number 1 single and all of the accompanying media coverage that went with it.
• With a bit of luck, my parents will be going wirless tomorrow or Thursday (probably the latter as the package has yet to be dispatched). We've ordered a Netgear WGR614UK Wireless router - I've been pleased with my Netgear DG834G ADSL modem and so we decided to go with Netgear again. It supports both WEP and WPA encryption, has a built-in firewall and also has 4 ethernet ports - handy, because it's likely that the router will be in the opposite corner of the house to the main PC and that the cables for it are already wired in - might as well use them rather than grapple with a weak wireless signal.
• I had a play with Gaim 2 Beta 1 yesterday. Doesn't look much different to me (this is looking at the Windows port, not the Linux version) and I managed to break it completely when trying to sign in to my Google Talk account. The new voice and video chat features haven't yet made it into the main release either.
• I've also been playing with Google Earth - my parents' machine is more powerful than my laptop and so it runs better. They've added better aerial photography of Leeds and Bradford - though it's still not as good as London or Manchester it is an improvement on what was there before. Newcastle now also has high resolution imagery, though there's a big label saying 'Gateshead' over Newcastle town centre. Ah well, at least it doesn't say 'Sunderland'...

So you're probably not wondering what happened this weekend, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Skip over this entry if the former is true.

I'm back in Bradford. We've had a good weekend - got to see Birmingham, had a good time at the Geek Dinner on Saturday night and a nice trip on the London Eye. And we got to meet Chris Romp and his roommate Katie.

I'll write up something more substantial at some point but right now we're both very tired. I'm listening to the soundtrack to the musical Avenue Q, featuring such songs as "What Do You Do With a BA in English?", "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", "The Internet is for Porn" and "I'm Not Wearing Underwear Today". It's hilarious.

Here is my iTunes Music Signature (256KB Ogg Vorbis file - play it in Winamp, Foobar2000 or VLC). Here's the tool to make it.

It's short snippets of 20 songs that I've given high ratings to (though it can also be your 20 most frequently played or something) and is supposed to identify my musical tastes. I'd say it does do a pretty good job - you can hear songs by Ash, The Killers, Green Day, Darren Tate, The Rasmus, Jet, The Caesers, Ascension, Madonna, Jay-Z and Linkin Park.

incidentally the file was converted to Ogg Vorbis using VLC, since I've now found out that VLC can also convert audio and video from one format to another. And stream it across a network (which was actually its original purpose as I understand). It can convert to many formats - essentially, anything it can open it can also export to - so that includes MPEG-1/2, MP3, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and FLAC for audio and DivX, H.263, H.264, MPEG-1/2/4, Ogg Theora and early versions of Windows Media for video. And that's just the Mac version. So that's yet another reason to download it.

While queueing at the checkout in Boots today, I saw that their 'Advantage Point' machines (where you insert your Boots loyalty card for details of extra offers) have their IP addresses and hostnames written on the back.

So I was about to write about how this is incredibly lax security and an open invitation to hackers, but then I actually looked at the IP address and found that it's one reserved for internal networks and can't be accessed from the internet. So you can't nmap it and find out what services are running and which ports are open. Which is obviously a good thing.

It's certainly better than when the new display screens were being set up in the student union bar - the username and password for the FTP server on the computer controlling them was displayed to everyone in the bar, as was the computer's IP address.

Tomorrow, a mere 10 minutes away in my time zone, is December 1st. This means:

• It is World Aids Day
• It is the birthday of one of Hari's housemates
• It is 25 days until Christmas
• That 2005 is almost over
• That my blog will turn 4 years old in less than 2 months time (incidentally the previous entry was the 3000th entry here)
• That I can open the first window on my advent calendar
• That is is 15 years since the two sections of the Channel Tunnel first met
• That mailman will send out its monthly password reminders again

Though it's not a holiday that we Brits celebrate (we had our fun on Guy Fawkes Night on November 5th), I just want to wish a belated happy thanksgiving to those who celebrate it.

incidentally I did actually have turkey for dinner last night, except it was turkey pieces in tandoori sauce, wrapped in pitta pockets with sour cream, courtesy of Hari. I also had a four hour meeting...

• Today was supposed to be my coursework day. So as you can imagine, I have done lots of non-coursework related stuff. Yay for procrastination.
• Much of my time was spent updating software on my laptop. I now have updated versions of, in no particular order:
  • Winamp
  • PDFCreator
  • Media Player Classic
  • Real Alternative
  • Programmers Notepad
  • Opera
  • EULAlyzer
  • 7-Zip
  • foobar2000
  • Microsoft Anti-Spyware
  • Mr QuestionMan
  • FeedDemon
  • SpeedFan
  • Nokia PC Suite
  • Mozilla ActiveX Control
  • WinSCP
  I think part of the reason behind there being so much stuff here is because I've mostly been using my Mac lately, so all but the most essential programs and those that automatically update have been updated. I also have less software on the Mac, partly because I haven't had it as long but also because some apps, such as PDFCreator, are redundant on Mac OS X since their functions are built in to the OS.
• Talking of Mac OS X, I finally found out how to change the printing options. It's been sat in front of me all this time, but I didn't realise that you had to use the Copies & Pages dropdown to access things like whether to print in black and white or colour, or what quality settings you wanted. Personally I think that dialog is badly designed. I also switched from using the driver that shipped with OS X to Epson's own drivers, which seem to offer more options, and include tools for checking ink levels and for cleaning the print heads. They look much nicer than their Windows equivalents.
• Hari and I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the cinema last night. Of the four films I think it's my favourite - I enjoyed it more than the others and there's lots of good special effects. My advice would be to see this in a cinema, rather than on DVD or downloaded illegally, as the experience is awesome. I haven't read the book so I can't tell you how faithful it is to the original story, but it seems to make more sense than the last one where (apparently) some key bits of the story were missed out. One word of caution, however: this is a long film - at 2 1/2 hours, I think it's the longest yet, however the time does pass quite quickly.
• My copy of You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand arrived today. Having listened to it through a couple of times I reckon it's better than the first album - certainly it's more upbeat, though I still think Take Me Out is their best song to date. The edition I bought had a bonus DVD with an interview and the video for Do You Want To.
• I know it's not even the end of November yet, but today I posted my first Christmas card. Mainly because the recipient is due to leave the country imminently. The rest will wait until it's actually December.
• And I also brought out my fairy lights, which surprisingly still work from last year despite only costing £1 in the first place. Got to love pound shops.
• Tomorrow I'll be making up for the fact I didn't finish my coursework today and also attending a buffet lunch in the computing department's new postgraduate centre, which is formally opening a mere 10 weeks later than planned.

For some time now I've wondered what the significance of '786' is. I've seen it in a lot of email addresses from people in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and it cropped up in this photo of some flowers left in memory Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, the woman police officer shot dead here on Friday.

While it's also another name for the Intel Pentium 4, it being the seventh generation of x86 processors and a continuation of the 286, 386, 486 numbering system that Intel used before the Pentium, it also roughly translates as "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful" when using Arabic Numerology. That phrase, or rather its arabic equivalent, is the first sentence of the Qur'an, and is commonly quoted by certain Muslim denominations.

It's amazing what you can find out from Wikipedia.

Because someone had the genius of holding a geek dinner at a weekend, myself and Hari will be going to the London Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble and Hugh McLeod on Saturday 10th December at the Texas Embassy Cantina (same place as last time, basically). The hotel is booked - £15 cheaper than last time, because it's a weekend, and it's split between the two of us this time - and we're just sorting out trains.

Would be great to see some of you there if you can make it. Here are my photos from last time.

There is something seriously wrong with the weather at the moment. We've had glorious sunshine for the past few days, and it's also forecast for today. And tomorrow. And the weekend. And into next week.

This is not right. First of all, this is Bradford, where it's supposed to be raining all the time. It's also the middle of November and we should really be heading into winter. But no, we got lots of sun. And this isn't one forecaster saying this - it's all of the ones I've checked.

Of course, being November, rather than have hot sunny days, we have bitterly cold sunny days, with the maximum temperatures hovering around the 6°C mark and the minimums dipping below freezing, so it's not all good - at least with some cloud cover it would be a bit warmer and I wouldn't have to keep turning the central heating up.

Today I discovered the joy that is Poundland.

Poundland is a chain of stores where all of its products cost £1. They sell a wide variety of stuff - often ends of lines and excess stock. Their shops tend to be in student towns and areas with high nunbers of low income families, so naturally Bradford has quite a large one. And it's great!

For some reason I imagined it would only sell crap that no-one would ever need, however today me and Hari spent £18 between us on stuff. Sure, there is a lot of crap there but there's some good stuff too, including some techy stuff - 4 port USB hubs and USB extension leads, Nokia hands-free kits, universal remote controls - as well as lots and lots of bags of crisps, tinned food, and jaffa cakes (proper McVities ones too). Over the years, had I done more of my shopping there I imagine I'd be much better off financially...

Okay, so it's a bit of a chav shop, but it's cheap and the products can be pretty good. I suppose the only danger is impulse buying and ending up with a load of crap that you don't need (and thus wiping out any savings you would have made).

• I'm still having mouse problems - or 'mousifers' as Hari calls them. I put out two traps on Sunday with pieces of jaffa cake on them, and came in yesterday to find that the little buggers had eaten both of the jaffa cake pieces without setting either trap off. I've tried again, this time with large chunks of Penguin biscuit - so far, both traps went off without catching anything and one piece of biscuit has been rather well nibbled. I've been told that slightly melted Mars bar is best so I'll try that, but if not it'll be poison - still, I'd rather not have to search the house for mouse carcasses.
• Speaking of Hari, today is our one month anniversary. She's currently on campus practising for a Christmas concert but I've cooked her chinese sweet and sour chicken for dinner.
• Cyberduck seems to be a good, free FTP client for Mac OS X. I used it properly for the first time today and it worked well - a simple, attractive interface and good ease of use. It's open source, available in a variety of languages and works with Growl. Along with Adium, there are now two duck icons in my dock, along with a thunderbird, a firefox and a frog (Azureus).
• Also for Mac OS X is RCDefaultApp, a preference pane that lets you easily set the default application for particular file types. Handy.
• UK users of the iTunes Music Store may like this week's free single of the week. The song is called The Great Escape and it's by a band called We Are Scientists - if Franz Ferdinand, The Killers and the like are your thing then check it out.
• I'm having a caption competition on this photo - any contributions are welcome. There's a couple of good ones there already. As for the photo, I was just pratting about with macam, which as you can see mostly works. That said it's currently stuck in my dock as running (though its process is not listed in Activity Monitor) and I can't close it, even using Force Quit, nor can I relaunch it. I expect it'll go away with a reboot.
• Tomorrow I'm off into town to do some shopping I think - need to start writing those Christmas cards...
• And sorry for there being no arrows in this post, despite the title. I'm running out of phrases with the word 'bullets' in them.

Update: Came back from the pub to find a ex-mouse attached to one of the traps. Poor thing got its leg stuck and bled to death :( . Oh well.

• I haven't posted for a few days because I haven't really had a lot to post about. It's not the my life has been particularly boring, it's just that it hasn't been wildly interesting either, and I haven't been compelled to write about anything I've seen on the internet either.
• Currently I'm back on Wifi again. One of my housemates has moved out, to spend the winter teaching people how to ski in France, and he's taken the extension lead that the ADSL modem was plugged into. Although I can plug the modem into the wall socket it means it's not near the cables which aren't very long. So until I get a new extension lead I'm going to need to do everything wirelessly.
• We've also been having a mouse problem, specifically in my room where I've been woken up by scratching and rustling noises. On my way in today I saw it and managed to chase it downstairs, where I got it trapped in a door and then ejected it from the building. Probably serves me right for leaving old takeaway boxes in my bin for rather longer than I should...
• I'm going to be blunt about this: if you're in the UK and need to use condoms, then you may like Covered Love. It's a site that lets you order condoms in bulk, with packs of 144 starting at £25, or around 17p per condom. When you consider that many vending machines charge £2 for 2 you can see why it's good value. They also do selection boxes.
• Last month I earned $258.22 in Google Adsense revenue. Not quite as much as September when I earned over $300 but it's still about £150 that I didn't have before. I'd like to sign up for the Firefox referral scheme but it's only available to US people right now.
• On Saturday I'm off with Hari and a couple of her housemates to York for the day, to do some Christmas shopping. It'll also be the first time she gets to meet my parents. Which could be interesting. On Sunday I'm going hiking again, around the Yorkshire Dales this time.

My copy of Red Dwarf VII arrived this morning. It's not officially due out until Monday but Play.com have a habit of dispatching pre-release DVDs a few days early. Not that I'm complaining of course.

It's got all 8 episodes, including 3 (Tikka to Ride, Ouroboros and Duct Soup) additionally available in extended form without the laughter track - none of series VII was shot in front of a live audience. There's also a remastered version of Tikka to Ride, and the 'lost' episode Identity Within in storyboard form and performed by Chris Barrie. And there's the usual slatherings of extra features.

I have coursework to do this afternoon so I don't yet have time to watch it, but I'm sure I'll find time later.

Unfortunately I'm no longer able to make the Irish Geek Dinner in Cork on the 30th November. I have an assessed practical assignment to do either on the Wednesday or Thursday which I cannot miss, and this would clash directly with the dinner. I've cancelled the hotel booking; easyJey, however, only issue refunds in the case of family bereavement so I'm £25 out of pocket on that front. It's a big shame as I really wanted to go but I'm a bit short of options :( .

On the other hand, if Robert Scoble and Hugh McLeod are planning a dinner in the north of England I'd be happy to attend :) .

I spent last night at the girlfriend's house. We had spaghetti bolognese for dinner, along with her housemates, however I couldn't finish mine so I put the leftovers in the bin. Doing so felt like an act of blasphemy, since you could argue that the spaghetti was a representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and that by putting it in the bin I was offending his noodliness.

If by doing this I have offended any members of the pastafarian community, I send my apologies.

incidentally things are going well between me and the girl. I'm going to miss her this weekend.

If you received an email from this domain that was spam, please understand that it wasn't me who sent it - the from address has been forged. I am now dealing with close to 4000 bounced emails that have not been delivered but that have bounced back to me - good thing I have a lot of space for email on the server.

And just when I was about to go away for the weekend. Raaaaa.

Update (Friday): Had over 6000 now and they're still coming. I now have a message filter to dump them straight in the trash. I'm just glad I have a fast internet connection as to manage this on dial-up would be absolute hell. I also feel sorry for my host who is having to manage all of this mail - the headers of the original messages have been forged quite blatently so there's no reason that they should be bounced.

On the plus side, my new 5-port network switch has arrived :) .

Another update: They're still coming thick and fast - hundreds every hour. I'm now about to leave for the weekend and dread to think what it'll be like come Sunday when I'm back. The spam messages all seem to be advertising a canadian pharmacy or ("Canadilan Phamracy") pointing to a domain owned by some bloke in India. The domain has no active web site on it.

• Out of my Flickr contacts, four have cat pictures as their most recent pictures in their photostreams and two have dog pictures. And two have screenshots. Mine is some grafitti.
• DarwinPorts is quite a cool program. Once installed you can type into the terminal, for example, sudo port install nmap and it'll download, compile and install nmap and its associated libraries (like pCap and OpenSSL). I suppose it's a bit like apt-get on Linux distros.
• The Party Party is a good source of politically humourous mashed-up songs. It takes bits of George W Bush's speeches to make him talk total crap (insert joke about Bush talking total crap all the time anyway). 'Dick is a Killer' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' are my current favourites.
• Now that I have got meta-contacts working in Adium, my contact list is about half the size it once was. Yay.
• Been listening to an old episode of The 99p Challenge, which is currently being re-broadcast on BBC7 and therefore available in the BBC Radio Player to play back at your leisure. It's very random at times but very funny.
• Paul Hammond emailed me about Locomotive, an open source graphical installer for Ruby on Rails for Mac OS X (10.3+). If only I'd known about that earlier...
• Still, Locomotive reminds me of Locomotive Software and their LocoScript word processing package for the Amstrad PCW. The software is still available today, and they've even made an old version available just in case your PCW still only has 256KB of RAM.
• And to end on a personal note - I'm currently seeing a girl. We've been on a couple of dates (such as seeing Wallace & Gromit) and have been spending a fair amount of time with each other. It's going pretty well so far - well, no complaints from me anyway.

• This is the first proper bullet-pointed entry in a few days. Which is probably a good thing.
• Spent the evening tidying my room and getting rid of the three piles o'crap that have amassed in my room. I've managed to destroy two but gave up before attempting the third, by which time I'd already filled two bin bags full of rubbish. Hmmm.
• There's a new version of Synergy out (1.2.5). I've installed it on my laptop - unfortunately it seems to have some stability issues - some unknown exceptions and it's managed to randomly disappear as well. On my Mac I'm still running SynergyKM which hasn't yet been updated.
• While out hiking yesterday, despite being on the tops of hills in the middle of nowhere I had perfect mobile phone reception. In fact, I was able to send a text message to my dad, and receive a reply all while up there. And my dad is currently on holiday several hundred miles away in another country. Imagine being able to do that a few years ago. I'm pretty sure that had I got my PDA and my phone set up to use GPRS I'd have been able to blog from up there.
• I installed Ruby on Rails on Saturday. Haven't really had much chance to play with it, but the installation process is a little scary - it involves typing commands into the terminal, even on Windows and Mac OS X. I'm not a big fan of using the terminal for anything (even though it's in my dock). Someone really needs to develop some kind of graphical installer.
• One of the great things about 2MBit broadband is being able to download all 31MB of the OS X version of MySQL 5.0.15 in a little under 2 minutes.

Ben Trott:

You can tell you're writing a lazy post when the first thing you type is <ul>.

That is so true. Hopefully now that I have an always-on internet connection that doesn't go slower than a quadriplegic tortoise I might be able to post more meaningful entries.

• Went to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit last night at the cinema and thoroughly enjoyed it - it's well worth going to see if you can. I'd give it 9/10.
• Coursework is starting to build up now - I have an essay about rootkits and how they impact forensic computer investigation to write, along with a "simple" adding program. In assembly language. There's also some ongoing cryptography stuff in Java.
• OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out for Windows, Linux and Solaris users - it's been on most techy blogs today but what the heck. A native Mac version is in the works though thankfully - as much as I like NeoOffice/J I'd appreciate some of the new features that OOo 2.0 brings - OpenDocument support especially.
• Still on target for having broadband on Saturday afternoon. I'm really starting to get sick of dial-up. Update (Friday): Apparently it's already active! I'm in the university at the moment so I can't check until after work tonight, but yay if it is ready.
• I'm hiking again on Sunday. Not quite sure where to but the weather looks okay. Next weekend I'm away for a two-day trip up in the Lake District which should be nice.
• There's a Geek Dinner in London with Molly Holzschlag on November 24th. As much as I'd like to go I don't think I'll have the time, and it's less than a week before I fly out for the Irish Geek Dinner. There's only so much that my wallet and my timetable can take.

Although it came out 5 years ago, I've decided to get myself a copy of Blur's Best of album. Normally I'd go straight to play.com or cd-wow.com to buy it, since those tend to be the cheapest. Play had it for £10 including delivery, and CD-Wow had it for £7, also including delivery. Not bad, but I thought I could do better.

Usually I also check Amazon and Tesco.com, but neither was significantly cheaper than CD-Wow and neither included the delivery cost. So I checked HMV's web site. Turns out they had a sale on and it was only £4 - or £3.59 if you have a NUS card - and that included delivery too.

While I've been very pleased with the service - and indeed the prices - offered by CD-Wow and Play, I'm also a sucker for low prices and so HMV wins here. I've ordered from HMV's online store before and had no problems so hopefully I've got myself a good deal.

incidentally, when the email arrived confirming my order, I saw this:

Please note we are in the process of relocating our Internet business to Guernsey, and as such you may experience a slight delay in the despatch of your order.

What with play.com, Tesco Jersey and Amazon Jersey, amongst others, the Channel Islands must be becoming a little crowded with all of those warehouses. Still, if tax loopholes mean cheaper stuff for me than I can't complain :) .

• There's one surefire way to check if students have their mobile phones switched on in lectures - send them all text messages. Because we're down with the cool cats here at Bradford, urgent messages are usually sent by SMS as well as email; however, officially we're supposed to have our phones turned off in lectures. Cue lots of beeping.
• Bloglines Mobile is very useful - the basic features of normal Bloglines on a small screen. It's great for reading full content feeds but others are a bit annoying - especially if the site isn't designed for small screens.
• I'm posting this on my PDA, as it happens. Unfortunately since upgrading to MT 3.2 I can't use the admin interface to post or edit entries - all that Javascript goodness means it doesn't work on IE4 (and doesn't gracefully degrade). Pocket SharpMT works but it's only good for posting new entries, not editing existing ones.
• This Saturday sees the start of Family Guy and American Dad on BBC2. I don't know whether they will start showing Family Guy from the beginning or just season 4, but it'll be nice to have it on terrestrial TV again. Fingers crossed I'll have the Stewie Griffin film early next week.

• Last night was interesting, and fun. I was at a house party in Thornton. From what I saw of it, it looks like a nice place.
• PlusNet have given us the 22nd October as the provisional activation date for our ADSL.
• A LAME encoder for iTunes. One less reason to use my laptop - iTunes' own MP3 encoder isn't that good, so this looks like a nice replacement. Also, throw in the G4-optimised LAME build for better performance.
• Still, it seems Apple don't think a lot of their iSight camera.
• Having not really been online much last week, I'm somewhat behind on my subscriptions - I have 692 unread items in Bloglines. Still, it's down from the 1000+ of yesterday, and most of those are in just 3 channels.
• The trees are starting to turn colour now so I may go out and get some autumn pictures. The weather's not great today, but then it is autumn so that's to be expected really.

1. Not posted since Monday
2. Made my first phone call on our BT line in months
3. Used the internet on my Mac for the first time
4. Ordered 2MB broadband from PlusNet (should be active end of next week)
5. Not been on a night out
6. Attended a talk with the vice chancellor
7. Got to keep my PDA for another couple of months
8. Upgraded to iTunes 6 and was totally underwhelmed
9. Was re-elected as a union councillor
10. Played around with my new phone
11. Unblocked a toilet while drunk
12. Watched and reviewed American Pie presents Band Camp
13. Remembered just how damn slow dial-up is
14. Upgraded to Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 beta 2
15. Watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on More4 every day, and mostly enjoyed it
16. Not had a curry

• Today has been a bit of an expensive day so far. Other than the £139 for the mobile phone, I've also a bought:
  1. A new haircut - £7.50.
  2. €40 ahead of my trip to Cork, which cost £28.something. Halifax charges me £1.50 on top of every transaction I make in foreign currency (including donations to overseas charities, such as the American Red Cross :-/ ) so I decided to get some comission-free cash before I went.
  3. A new camera case (to ensure that my new camera lasts a bit longer than my old one) - £8.99
  4. A mobile phone for my father - £45.98 for a Nokia 3120 from eBay. He has a rather old 3510 which he's not too keen on, and the 3120 is a nice, uncomplicated phone. I'll get this back off him at some point but I have a PayPal account and he doesn't.
• My Making the most of SpamLookup guide has now been made mostly obsolete due to the official manual now having quite a good guide. If you can think of any improvements to Six Apart's manual, let them know as all of the sections of the manual have comments enabled. You will need a TypeKey account to post.
• In case it wasn't entirely clear, I'm at home in York this weekend. It means I'll miss the hiking club's 14 mile walk near Todmorden tomorrow but I should be back for the Sunday night curry.
• Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 and Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 are both out. I'm using Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 here on my parents' machine as an upgrade from 1.0.6 and it seems to be going well. As for my laptop, I'll wait until the automatic update service is up and running to test that, since the upgrade from Beta 1 to Beta 2 of Firefox is only 700KB.
• I have a cold. I think it's the one that's going around our office, but it means that my nose could put up a good fight with the niagra falls and my throat feels like someone's rubbed sandpaper on it. I've had worse colds and this is the first one I've had in some time (so I'm probably due it) so I suppose it could be worse. At least it's not 'flu...
• BT phoned me yesterday (before my mobile phone went for an involuntary swimming session) - the BT account is now in my name and should be reactivated within days. With a bit of luck, we really should have broadband in the next couple of weeks.

Last month I earned over US$300 in Google Adsense revenue - or just under £175. September has therefore been my best ever month, and if this trend continues I'll be earning over £2000 per year.

$40 of that has, however, been donated to the American Red Cross for their Katrina Relief Effort.

Just fixed a mismatched HTML tag that was stopping certain less liberal feed readers from parsing the Atom feed correctly (NetNewsWire seems to be one of the main culprits - it'll allow some errors in RSS but will refuse to parse any Atom feeds that aren't well-formed. So much for Postel's Law...). So apologies if you see lots of new entries appearing.

I've been up in the Dales on my first hike with the university hiking club. We went up to Malham and Gordale Scar - the weather was quite nice and I got some good photos that I'll upload at some point (maybe tomorrow). The walk is usually 7 miles, if you go up Gordale Scar, but as I didn't fancy climbing up a waterfall in my walking boots (my proper hiking boots are still in York) I took a detour which added on an extra mile. Still, after a summer of not doing a lot, the exercise is very much welcome, and like most hikes there was a good pub at the end in Malham village.

The plan for tonight is a curry, and indeed the plan for tomorrow is a curry from the same curry house since it's my housemate's birthday. I'll not be having curry on Tuesday, I imagine.

Play.com has Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story for £12 (the film also known as The Family Guy Movie). It's out on the 24th October, and I've ordered a copy - I never managed to download it and at the rate I'm going it'll be out by the time I'll have downloaded it so I might as well buy it. Not much in the way of extra features though - some commentaries and deleted scenes. Some of my friends have seen it and apparently it's freakin' sweet, as one might say.

CD-WOW also have the US version available now for £14 but you'll need a multi-region player since it's region 1, and it will take up to week for delivery since they're based in Hong Kong I think.

And I'd also better mention that Play.com are now selling the Red Dwarf VII DVD at only £14.99 - when I first ordered it, it was £16.99, though as it's not out yet it appears that they're charging me the lower price.

I was wondering why hadn't seen any new comments in a while on here, but then that might be because I haven't actually posted here since Tuesday. I've been rather busy with work, lectures and also having a social life so I haven't had all that much time to mope around on the internet lately.

Of the 6 modules I'm taking this semester I've had lectures in 5 of them (the 6th is on Monday morning), and of those one is really good, one is alright, one would be good if the lecturer wasn't so arrogant, one hasn't really got going yet so I can't pass proper judgement but looks really interesting, and the other one looks really hard. The 'really good' one is Crime Scene Management, which is actually run by the Archaeology department and West Yorkshire Police, and in the lecture yesterday we were actually looking at two mocked-up crime scenes to try to find evidence and assess what would need to be done prior to the start of an investigation (cordoning, fact-finding, sourcing of equipment etc.). Beats sitting in a room having someone babble on about ASCII codes and assembly language at you.

Tomorrow is one of the university's big open days (the third of three that we have each year) so I'm working that, from 8:30am in the morning, and on Sunday I have my first hike with the Hiking Club. Not entirely sure where we're going yet though. I may well not bother going out tonight, bearing in mind I went to bed about half nine last night since I could barely stay awake, and that tomorrow's an early start. And Sunday.

incidentally I'm posting this from a cluster machine in the library, which thankfully all have Firefox installed (though they're still on the now rather insecure version 1.0 and not 1.0.7). The machines also appear to have MSN Messenger 7.5 on which, having been used to clients like Trillian and Adium for so long, is awful - full of peripheral crap that I really don't need or care about, like winks, nudges, packs, handwriting etc. The contact list is also a pane on any resolution less than 1280x1024 - huge advertising banner, those tabs down the side (which can, admittedly, be disabled), web search box (totally useless because I have one already in the browser) and that weird notification thing that tries to get you to join their customer experience improvement programme. I'll be sticking with Trillian and Adium for now.

Update: Well now, this is interesting. The system happily let me upgrade Firefox 1.0 to 1.0.7 on this machine. Hmmm.

Well, okay not millions, but with all of the students now back on campus it's certainly much busier now after the calm of the last three months. I'm in one of the computer labs (about the only one that is open since the others are still being refurbished) and it's bustling with activity for once.

The Firefox problem that I mentioned yesterday turned out not to be the fault of a broken profile, but of the mozcc extension. So there was probably no need for me to reset my profile. Oh well.

And after not far off 18 months I've taken down my Wordpress test blog. I was starting to get a lot of spam over there and as I don't really use it I didn't see the point in installing some big fancy anti-spam system.

Since I've been mostly away from the internet from a few days I haven't had chance to update you on what's been going on.

End of freshers week

Freshers Week is over for another year, and so I've spent most of the weekend catching up on sleep. I eschewed a house party last night which, while I would loved to have gone to, would have left me feeling awful today. I'm still tired and I had 12 hours sleep last night. The FND on Friday was good - we had the Honeyz playing (a British r'n'b act from a few years ago who are apparently aiming to make a comeback). They were actually drafted in at the last minute as the act we had booked - Clea, a girl band of Pop Idol rejects - let us down a few days ago. Tonight I may go to the pub quiz and I'll probably be out tomorrow night but otherwise I'll be staying in most of this week. Wake me up when September ends.

Photos

Freshers week photos are up on Flickr. Well, most of them - there's a few that I've left out to save embarrassment for several people. The new camera seems to be doing well.

Firefoxiness

I've created a new profile in Firefox to stop a bug that was making the first tab unclosable (it also wouldn't show the throbber if a page was loading). My profile has been dragged through the alpha builds and a few nightlies so it's a bit 'dirty', so to speak, so I created a new one and then migrated my settings, cookies and stored passwords over. I'm now in the process of re-installing my extensions. Resetting profiles isn't something that average users should have to do but when you regularly run test builds things can get a bit messed up.

Subscriptions

There's one big problem when you subscribe to 180 different feeds - when you're not really around for a week, you end up being well behind. Yesterday I had something like 1000 unread articles. I've basically ignored CNet News, The Register and Engadget which both had 200 unread (the maximum Bloglines lets you view) and then skim-read the rest.

New Housemate

Our new french housemate moved in yesterday. I haven't had much of a chance to talk to him but he seems like a nice guy nonetheless. He's currently kipping in the living room since the room he'll be staying in will be occupied until next weekend when the other housemate moves out. Still got no internet yet though and my library card has now stopped working - I'm currently on my own in one of the student common rooms which has a wireless cloud.

Wifi Woe

incidentally I'm mostly using my old 802.11b card instead of my newer 802.11g card due to the latter's tendency to disconnect every few minutes for no reason. I'm waiting to see whether it's a specific problem with the university network or the card itself. I'm using the latest drivers.

Growling

Growl is awesome. I've had it installed for a while but it hasn't been until I've installed GrowlTunes and HardwareGrowl that t has come into its own. The former displays the title of the song in iTunes when it starts playing and the latter lets you know when a new Firewire, USB or Bluetooth device is plugged in, or when a new drive is mounted. Its speech capabilities are also quite cool - you can have it tell you audibly that a drive is plugged in instead of it merely displaying a visual message.

Slashdot

The new standards-compliant Slashdot is a big improvement. The markup is very clean and it now seems like it loads much more quickly too. It's also got a handheld stylesheet for viewing on PDAs and a print stylesheet for printing. A new theme would be nice, but I suppose now that all the presentation is done using CSS this shouldn't be too difficult.

Freeview

Since the living room is out of action I've taken back my digibox and the internal TV aerial and hooked them up to the TV in my room. We now have almost all of the Freeview channels working - Channel 5 and a few of the shopping channels are a bit fuzzy but the former still works on analogue and the latter are of no interest to me. It also means we now get E4 - previously we could only get E4+1 so we had to watch everything on a one hour time delay. We'll also be able to get More4 when it launches on October 10th - it'll be showing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at 8:30pm every evening, and Sky Three which is replacing Sky Travel. Sky Mix, which we don't get, will become a resurrected Sky Two, a channel that was around in the late nineties as an accompaniment to Sky One. [Via]

µTorrent

µTorrent looks interesting - a reasonably well-featured BitTorrent client that is only 82KB in size and typically requires less than 4MB of memory, making it an ultra-skinny supermodel compared to an 80lb gorilla like Azureus. At first glance it actually looks like quite a good client too, with a nice Windows XP native interface. No installer though, and it's currently Windows only - though a Mac OS X client appears to be in development too. [Via]

Back on course

Tomorrow is the second stage of my enrolment where I get my new student card (so I'll be back in the library) and become a proper student again. On Friday I had a chance to meet up with other members of my course, who seemed alright - all but one are male, though one is someone I know from my undergraduate studies which is nice. The Computing MSc courses are very male-dominated, moreso than the undergraduate courses, which is a bit of a shame but I suppose it's the way of the world.

I don't know how often I'll be updating here from now on - over the summer I had more free time because fewer of my friends were about, but they're all back at university now. Updates should increase in frequency once I get internet at home again but until then I can't guarantee that I'll be as prolific as I have been in the past.

If you're in or around the university campus on Sunday evening, join us for a pub crawl touring some of Bradford's finest drinking holes. Meet at around 5pm (to leave at 6pm) in the Courtyard. New students are especially welcome.

• Life is getting a little hectic now - and Freshers' Week hasn't even started yet. Yesterday I was out for the boss's birthday at a local curry house, tonight I'll be eating the leftover starters. It was very nice but there was just too much food for everyone. I still felt bloated this morning.
• Talking of this morning, I found exactly 1 place in the university where I could use a cluster machine before 8:45am. Outside term time the library isn't open until then, and the School of Informatics have closed 5 out of their 6 open access labs for upgrades. And for some reason my access card is rejected by the 6th one so I can't get in outside of usual hours (i.e. 9am-6pm weekdays). Said cluster is in the Richmond Building, or Richmond Bilding as its sign currently reads.
• And as for Freshers' Week, we've got some potentially interesting events. On Monday we have Tim Westwood doing a live DJ set, and on Wednesday some Godskitchen DJs are playing. Thursday is an Indie night with a live band and Friday is the usual FND.
• Apparently Google have launched a Blog search engine. I only found this out because almost every blog on my blogroll said something about it. Technorati was giving me slightly better results for the test queries I tried.
• On a related note, Google Local Search is great. I had someone on the phone today needing phone numbers for hotels that weren't full this weekend (most are full of parents whose offspring are arriving at university on Sunday) - typing 'cedar court hotel in bradford' brought up the address and phone number straightaway.
• Elise has put a copy of my SpamLookup article on Learning Movable Type. Perhaps ironically the first comment on it was spam.
• EULAlyzer sounds interesting - it's by Java Cool Software, creators of SpywareBlaster. You feed a EULA into it and it tells you if there's anything 'interesting' about it - whether it permits the software to install spyware, send information about you to its makers or sell your mother-in-law on eBay. The latter may not necessarily be a bad thing but it's nice to be able to know about it without reading the whole EULA. It found nothing interesting about FeedDemon's EULA, and only a couple of references to third-party extensions in Firefox's EULA. I didn't try it on anything like Kazaa as I'm not the sort of person who'd have that lying around on my hard drive. Courtesy of Ed Bott

The first edition of the new all-colour "Berliner" Guardian came out this morning. Although my lunch hour has recently gone down to a half hour I still got myself a copy, and I have to say I'm very impressed with the new design. The smaller size also makes the paper much easier to handle, especially on a desk like mine which still has piles of papers left over from clearing. I particularly like the new centre-fold photo, and the new font is very readable while still looking more modern than before.

But what's impressed me most is reading the Editors' Blog. The process of bringing the new paper into the world has been blogged in a high level of detail, with photos showing many of the key stages. But also questions posed by commenters have been answered in later posts - 'Is Guardian Unlimited Changing Too?' and Should Doonesbury be saved? being two of them. The level of interaction between readers and journalists here is impressive and it's great to see the conversation develop and reader input make a difference in the final product.

By the way, if anyone missed the final broadsheet edition of The Guardian on Saturday, there's at least 3 on sale at eBay. I have a copy but only the main section and I intend to keep it :) .

• Went to Salts Mill with the parents today. At lunch, we were sat in Salt's Diner, and at the table opposite a woman sat down and got out a cigarette (there were no free tables in the non-smoking section). As she was doing so, she looked at me and smiled. Initially I thought nothing of it, but it turns it she was actually the author Anne Fine, who was doing a book signing there today. She wrote the book behind the film Mrs Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams.
• My mother also brought over a cover for one of my easy chairs - I have three, one came with the house and the other two were salvaged from the student union when they were clearing out their board room. It's now blue, instead of a horrible brown colour, with the other one getting a cover soon. When she brought them over, she had to adjust them, and in doing so made a real mess on my floor, which she left for me to vacuum up; this was despite me having tidied and vacuumed before she'd arrived to stop her complaining. Yeah, thanks mum...
• My Griffin iMic arrived today - well, actually it arrives several days ago at home but my parents only brought it through today. Its sound output is much better than the built-in headphone socket of the Mac Mini, and it comes with an auxiliary cable adaptor for plugging in things like cassette decks and turntables. And it adds a microphone/line in port which will be handy as the Mac Mini doesn't come with one - now I'll be able to Skype people, provided that we get broadband some time soon.
• The Guardian has launched its Editors Blog - ...where senior Guardian staff write about the decisions they make, and the reasons behind them. Today Victor Keegan is writing about the Guardian's relaunch tomorrow in a new, smaller size (sort-of halfway between a broadsheet and a tabloid) and its new look.

A few weeks back, while I was waiting for my Mac to arrive, a salesman from npower turned up on our doorstep. Apparently at some point in the past someone in our house had been an npower customer, but had moved away (we're with British Gas for our gas and electricity - the landlords sorted it out, not me), and it was his job to try to get us back, apparently. He was really pushy, not taking no for an answer. Eventually I lied to him by saying that I was about to go on holiday and therefore wouldn't be able to cancel within the 14-day cooling off period if I changed my mind, at which point he finally gave up (this was after about 15 minutes).

Anyway, fast-forward to today and I'm paying our first bills from British Gas. After seeing this BBC news article I decided to see how much we'd probably save if we had switched to npower. According to the tool on Energywatch's site, we could have saved a whole £12 per year - or 2% of our annual bill. Considering the hassle of switching it's not really worth it.

British Gas were the most expensive option but the most we could save is £66/year by switching to Powergen Online. In any case I'm not going to bother.

I've heard some scare stories about npower's customer service - when npower took over from Yorkshire Electricity a few years back a colleague of mine did not receive an electricity bill for 6 years, and was then sent a bill for over £1000 with only a month to pay. At least with British Gas they've sent us bills two months into the tenancy with managable amounts.

DigitalSpy has details of Channel 4's new digital channel, More4, launching in early October on Sky, cable and Freeview.

Most of the programmes will be documentaries but it will also include some US imports like The West Wing. It will also show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on a one-day delay. Which is great because The Daily Show is excellent but not widely available here - I think there's an omnibus edition on CNN Europe but only once a week and at about 3am, or something. It'll also be the first time that viewers of Freeview can watch it as CNN is only available on Sky and cable here. Obviously you can download it, but that's not strictly legal, of course.

Our Freeview reception is patchy but we can get E4+1 - hopefully we'll be able to get More4 or More4+1 when it launches.

• I should have internet at home some time in the next 3 weeks. The housemate who hasn't paid the BT bill should be back at the end of this week or the beginning of next week.
• I'm back on the clearing line, but on the rather more sociable hours of 9am-4:30pm instead of 8:30am-7pm. Which means I get less pay but don't feel so bloody knackered at the end of the day.
• This sounds interesting. It's a solar-powered phone charger for Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Siemens phones, but also has its own rechargeable battery pack so if you don't have any sunlight you can still charge your phone. At £35 I'm not sure if I'd find it useful but I suppose it's something to think about.
• For some reason the university firewall blocks port 5222, which is the normal port used by Jabber. I can use Jabber over legacy SSL on port 5223, but 5222 is the recommended port. Still, it means I'm on Jabber and Google Talk again.
• Now that I've actually used GeoBloggers and found how easy it is to tag your own photos, I'll start adding Geotags to my Flickr photos. There's not many tagged photos in Bradford yet.
• I have a new blind in my room. It's very snazzy.
• I tried the new Google Desktop with the sidebar yesterday. Although the sidebar could potentially be useful for some, it didn't seem worth it for me. The mail function doesn't seem to work with Thunderbird and I don't use my Gmail account enough for it to be useful, the weather function is US-only and I have my own instant messaging and web feed software (it shows your Google Talk buddies if you have it installed). Still, it does everything the old version did as well so it's still worth keeping.
• OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta 2 is out. Should be more stable than beta 1, if any of you tried that. Windows, Linux and Solaris.
• Console is my latest favourite Mac OS X tool. It's a live log file viewer - you can have it view Apache's error_log, for example, to view web page errors.

Since Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (or Pastafarianism) is now starting to, um, take off, here's my predictions for the future:

• 2006: In California, the first United Church of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is established. Pirates start eschewing ships for Segways.
• 2007: First succesful legal case where a follower of the religion sued for being forced to work Fridays, against his religious beliefs.
• 2008: At an international Pastafarian gathering, several hundred followers of the faith have a joint revelation. Pirates now commonplace on the streets of most cities.
• 2009: Air pollution reaches its lowest levels for 10 years due to the increasing numbers of pirates. Latest Prada range is pirate and spaghetti-themed.
• 2010: The fifth anniversary of the religion becoming popular sees another global gathering and worshipping of Bobby Henderson, the prophet.
• 2011: The preliminary results of the UK census show a drop in the number of people claiming to be Jedis but an increase in followers of FSM.
• 2012: Protests take place during the London Olympics due to the decision by the IOC not to include swashbuckling as an olympic event.
• 2013: Microsoft Chairman Robert Scoble becomes the first follower of FSM to lead a major multinational company.

Over the years I have bought a number of things from CD WOW, and they've always been delivered within their quoted timescale (5-7 working days) without fail. It's their consistently good service and low prices that keep me coming back.

But now they've set a new record: a CD I ordered shortly before 10pm on Monday arrived this morning. And this is despite the fact that they are based in Hong Kong and me in the UK - i.e. pretty much the other side of the world.

• Been a generally normal day at work today, except...
• There was a bomb scare, apparently. I say apparently because I was in the affected building and knew nothing about it until after the event.
• I'm currently in the library downloading stuff for my new flash drive - currently I've got Portable Firefox and Thunderbird, plus the installers for Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6; Spybot S&D (and the latest Includes installer), Ad-Aware, Microsoft AntiSpyware, SpywareBlaster; McAfee Stinger, the university licensed copy of VirusScan Enterprise 8 and the latest SuperDAT engine. Should be useful for fixing broken computers and with it being larger than my previous drive it'll mean I have more space for me-stuff.
• I might also try Konfabulator now that it's owned by Yahoo and free, but then I'll also be getting a Mac in a few days with Dashboard.
• Windows Vista isn't the best name ever but I'm having difficulty thinking of anything better, and they could have chosen something much worse. Like Windows Poo, or something.
• I finally got around to testing out the DivX support on my Skyworth DVD player last night, and a downloaded copy of a well-known adult-orientated American animated comedy series that I had burnt to CD-R played back fine. It also supports Kodak Picture CDs but I've not tried one of those yet. Not bad for the £30 that I paid for it back in December.
• On a related note, someone leaked the forthcoming Family Guy movie "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" onto Usenet a whole 2 months prior to its release. It's now available from various BitTorrent trackers, either as a DVD-quality ISO or an XVid AVI. [via Waxy's Links]
• Compressing the Microsoft AntiSpyware setup file again using 7-Zip and saving it as a SFX archive makes it 13% smaller and shaves off 869KB. That's probably why an increasing number of installer packages like Inno Setup and NSIS use 7-Zip's LZMA compression.

I'm sat on the train back to Bradford (another direct one with wifi, woohoo!), ready to leave King's Cross. The verdict on Open Tech 2005? Possibly the best £5 I've spent in a very long time.

There was wifi at the event (and indeed lots of geeks with Powerbooks reading their Bloglines subscriptions) however for some reason I couldn't get it to work with this PDA. Damn Windows Mobile...

Anyway, what follows is my take on the days events.

Great. Two days before I decide to head to London some idiots try to blow up the tube, again. I'm still intending to go to Open Tech 2005 but will leave the final decision until either tomorrow or early Saturday morning. I really don't want to let a collection of mindless pillocks with detonators dictate what I want to do with my time.

(If like me you'll be going to OT05 from King's Cross, I think the best route is to take a northbound Northern Line train to Euston, then a southbound to Embankment and then pick up the District Line; at time of writing this was possible)

Anyway, graduation yesterday was excellent, bar the boring and overlong speeches. I'll put some more photos up in due course. Still no internet at home but Bulldog have replied to my email and said that there is a "particular problem" with my order and they "will be in touch shortly". They also "apologise in advance for this delay".

Something terrible has happened.

The terribly inconsiderate people behind Crazy Frog have decided to build on the success of the Axel F single (recent number 1 in the UK) and release a full 16 track album of Crazy Frog songs. It's out on Monday.

Someone kill me now.

Songs that have been stuck in my head today:

• Spoiled & Zigo - More and More
• Suggs - Cecilia
• Stereogram - Walkie Talkie Man
• The Bullseye Themetune

Just thought I'd share that with you. Thanks for all of your messages on the previous entry, by the way.

Ed Bott has an interesting comparison between US and UK media coverage of the London attacks yesterday. While CNN over in the US was hyping up the blasts - speculating about further attacks and retaliation - the BBC was much calmer, suggesting that the situation was under control.

Certainly there's been a difference in how UK and US blogs have covered this which follows how the respective media outlets in the two countries have reacted. The Brits have been quite chilled out and defiant about the whole thing, whereas there has been an outpouring of emotion and sympathy from those in the US as if this was some major catastrophe.

Sure, our own commercial media have been a little more sensationalist, but then sensationalism sells. The BBC don't have to line the pockets of any shareholders but as a public service broadcaster they do have a duty to offer fair and unbiased reporting of the events, which from what I can tell they have mostly achieved.

I've had the 'I Believe in the BBC' badge on this site for a long time now and see no reason to remove it. The Beeb is a real asset to this country and the events of yesterday gave more proof, if ever it were needed, of why it is so important to us.

It's the morning after the day before, and London is already on its way back to normality. The buses and underground are both running again. albeit on a limited service, and many people returned to work today.

As I noted yesterday, the mood is less of sadness and sorrow, but of anger at those responsible, and disbelief at the general futility of it all. It's obviously been a major talking point here of late, and most of those I have spoken too are more peeved about it than anything else - plans for the weekend disrupted, unwanted changes to TV schedules and so on. Many also feel that the terrorists wasted their time - all they did was to kill a few innocent people and injure others. While that doesn't distract from the fact that this is a tragedy for the family and friends of the victims, this isn't some kind of major wound in our side - 'tis but a scratch. We've had the IRA cut holes in our town centres. We've had the Blitz during WW2, which was like the events of yesterday but every day for several weeks. All that the terrorists have done is made more people hate them, and, if they are indeed suicide bomb attacks, lost some of their ranks. I dare say that they may even have alienated some of the more extreme members of the Islamic faith, as a number of muslims were among the victims yesterday. And notice how many muslim organisations denounced the attacks - surely if the terrorists felt they were representing the Islamic viewpoint there would not have been the widespread condemnation that we have seen.

All in all, it was a waste of everyone's time - both the terrorists and those of the general public and emergency services, who were both utterly brilliant yesterday and played no small part in keeping the death toll as low as it was. Considering three of these bombs went off underground in train tunnels it is almost a miracle that there weren't more deaths than the quoted figures.

Life for Londoners - and indeed the rest of the country - will undoubtedly continue as normal. We survived the Blitz so there's no question that we can make it through this.

Rich sums up my feelings very well.

Since I'm still rather internetless (and likely to be so into next week :( ), this is what I would have posted about over the past few days but condensed into bullet points:

• The big news of the day is the London Terrorist Attacks, allegedly caused by Al-Quaida. So far there have been over 30 deaths and many more injured. Not good timing, considering that London won the Olympic bid yesterday, but thankfully the death toll hasn't (so far) been as high as other attacks. The Guardian is logging events as they happen.
• The general reaction from most people I know has been more of annoyance than fear. It's not sent people into panic, it's just disrupted a few meetings. But then we've had the IRA bombing our town centres for years and all we've done is used it as an excuse for regeneration (taking Manchester as an example).
• And for the 4 people who have already emailed me: yes, I'm fine, as are my friends and family. My thoughts are with those that have not been so lucky today.
• Anil Dash: Don't Be A Bad Pitcher! I'm starting to get a few emails like this and Anil took the words out of my mouth. Also see this hilarious follow-up.
• In Europe, The European Parliament have rejected the Software Patents Bill by a landslide. Here's some interesting analysis of it.
• Gizmo looks interesting - it's very much like Skype but uses the open SIP standard instead of Skype's proprietary protocols, so that other applications can work with it (like Trillian). For Windows, Mac and Linux, but no Pocket PC version yet.
• President Bush's comments about corrupt African leaders amused me - "We'll give aid, absolutely; we'll cancel debt, you bet -- but we want to make sure that the governments invest in their people; invest in the health of their people, the education of their people; and fight corruption,". Yes, Mr Bush.
• Movable Type 3.2 is coming and Six Apart are writing about a new feature each day until the release. Looks like a very worthwhile upgrade already.
• Test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are out; 1.0.5 will be a minor release to correct some security problems. There's also news on the IDN front; Mozilla seems to be following Opera's lead here.
• The problems my parents were having with their NTL internet connection last week seem to have been caused by the set-top box and weren't the fault of NTL itself. But then we've had the same set-top box since 1999 (and it's been turned on constantly for most of the past 6 years) so it's probably no wonder; in any case, it's now been replaced with a newer model that works. Meanwhile it's likely that NTL and Telewest will announce a merger this month. About time.
• There's an update to XP's File and Settings Transfer Wizard to allow settings to be transferred from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of Windows XP. If you buy a new computer with Windows XP 64-bit then this may be useful; the wizard makes moving to a new computer much easier and is often overlooked.

That's all for now. See you soon.

Having a few internet access problems right now. With a bit of luck I'll be back soon, but in the meantime all comments not posted via TypeKey will be moderated.

I suffered quite a major spam attack last night, and although some comments made the moderation queue the combination of SpamLookup, MT-Blacklist and Real Comment Throttle stopped any of it making it onto the public site. That was probably the worst attack I've had since before Christmas.

Update (4th July): With a bit of luck, normal blogging service will be resumed tomorrow night. Unfortunately the person with the broadband account details has just gone on holiday for a month so we're having to piece together bits of info to be able to get the password. It wasn't helped that when I went back to York for the weekend my parents' NTL connection wasn't working either.

Edinburgh was great, by the way :) .

Update (5th July): Gaaagh. This may take longer than planned. If you're in need of a broadband ISP, avoid Tiscali like the plague. Hopefully we'll be able to move to another company soon.

If you have ever wondered what happens when you put a Wifi card inside a microwave, then Jasmine and Dan (whom I met at the London Geek Dinner) have just the thing for you: a video. With some strong language.

(That last sentence was not a pun)

Today's Steve Bell cartoon is one of his best.

On the subject of ID cards, Liberty, an organisation broadly equivalent to ACLU in the US, took out a full page advert in the Guardian today encouraging readers to join the campaign against ID cards. If you're against them and you haven't already signed the petition, do so now. I used to be in favour of ID cards but even I now think they're a bad and very expensive idea.

Recently, maps of the London Underground have been including details of stations which are accessible to wheelchair users - either those with street-level exits or lifts in addition to stairs or escalators. You can download this map as a PDF file at the Tube Maps page at the Transport for London site, which has, incidentally, been written with accessible HTML.

If you look at the map, you'll see that the vast majority of stations are not accessible to wheelchair users, including some of the big ones like King's Cross. Others, like Waterloo, are only partially accessible.

In fact the only line where all stations are accessible is the Docklands Light Railway, but then this is a comparitively recent line. The Jubilee Line manages quite a number of accessible stations but the majority of these are on the Jubilee Line Extension which is only a few years old.

It isn't until you travel with a wheelchair user that you realise just how difficult it is - when I went with a friend in October last year getting to the Picadilly Line platforms at King's Cross was something of a challenge. Thankfully, the other two stations we visited - Earl's Court and Kensington Olympia - are both accessible.

In its defence, Transport for London are working on improving the situation - King's Cross will have full lift access by 2008 once the current expansion works there are complete. And they do have their work cut out - upgrading every single station on the network will cost an absolute shedload due to the extra tunneling that's likely to be needed and it may even be impossible in some places. Upgrading other forms of transport like buses is much cheaper and many of London's black cabs can take a wheelchair easily, so it is somehwat forgivable if TfL don't have sorting the underground out as one of its priorities.

Still, if you are a wheelchair user, you may want to consider living and working in south east London.

I don't go the cinema that often - in fact, last time it was to see Spiderman II - but tonight I went to see Sin City with a friend. It's been out in the US for some time but only opened here a few weeks ago, but it was worth seeing. Very dark, both in terms of the way the film was shot and the storylines, but enjoyable. And the women in it weren't bad, either.

Thanks to the wonders of BitTorrent I was able to watch an episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart. I've never seen a full edition before (though occasionally I've been pointed to clips of interesting segments), and I'm a bit disappointed it's taken me this long to get around to viewing a show - it was pretty good. While I doubt I'll be downloading every edition I'll certainly be watching it again in future.

Anyone know if any TV channels available over here in the UK show it? I'm guessing it'll be on some obscure Sky channel if it is...

• The TFT screen should be coming tomorrow! Mind you, it is being delivered by ParcelFarce... In any case, according to the tracking page it's in the central 'hub' and will be delivered some time tomorrow.
• On one of my entries one of the Google ads was for searchingmsn.co.uk, which at first sight appears to be a mirror of MSN Search UK. I was about to make a post about the irony of Microsoft advertising their search engine via Google, but then I checked the whois record. It's hosted in Germany and the registrant is one Neil Hutchinson who is an individual and has elected not to have his address on the whois record. It was also only registered on Wednesday with 1&1. Intriguing.
• incidentally, msn.co.uk is registered with Register.com and is registered to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, rather than Microsoft UK. They've owned it since September 1994.
• At work I had a request from someone in Nigeria who stipulated that he wanted printed materials and not a CD-ROM because "we do not have the technology in my country". I swear we need a quotes archive there, some of the emails we get are priceless.
• At risk of inducing ire in most of you, I actually think the video for the Crazy Frog song that's at #1 in the singles chart is quite cool. The song is still awful though.
• Here's one of the t-shirts I got for my birthday. It's from Next, incidentally.
• While I'm mentioning Flickr, my photos from last year's Beach Party are up. I lost them in September when my HD failed and only got access to backup copies a few weeks ago. I took many more than the 15 there but those are the best ones. This year's Beach Party is on June 17th and promises to be bigger and better than last time.
• I've discovered that VLC is much more efficient at playing back XVid movies than Media Player Classic or Windows Media Player - the CPU usage is much lower and it's possible to perform other tasks at the same time without it affecting playback. The latest beta, 0.82, also seems to be better than previous versions at smoothing the output when the window is resized or at full screen, which was my main bugbear with the program.

This is a really cool idea - a locking device for tubs of Ben & Jerry's ice cream to stop thieving housemates from helping themselves to it. I could have really done with one of these in halls - I was paranoid about buying a tub and leaving it in the freezer only to find it gone the next day.

Found via Boing Boing.

Thanks for the t-shirt, Dave - it actually arrived a couple of weeks ago but I haven't got around to taking a photo of it yet. It's been worn a few times since arriving though :) .

If you've also got one and have a photo of you wearing it, upload it to Flickr with the tag badmonkey :) .

The 6th season of Big Brother started last night. With my somewhat restricted access to TV (of which I'll have to put up with for one more month until I move house), it means I won't be able to watch it habitually this time around, but I did download last night's opener and the first installment of Big Brother's Little Brother (which is usually much better than the actual show).

First impression? Please, please let Kemal win - he just seems awesome. 'Science' makes me laugh as well and Derek comes across as a black gay Boris Johnson, which can't be a bad thing, can it? Anthony and especially Craig deserve early evictions though.

The girls seem okay although Lesley scares me (that nurses outfit... hmmm...). Sam seems cool, Mary needs a serious reality injection and I think Makosi might grow on me as the series progresses.

I think it will be an interesting series. Unlike last year I can see myself liking several of the housemates, which is cool.

A friend of mine is expecting a baby any day soon, and as I had a bit of free time I decided to create a random exotic name generator. It is pretty random; although it is intelligent enough to create words that are somewhat pronouncable most will still look like gibberish.

Alas, it won't yet generate the ultimate exotic name: Frogmella.

I think computers are pre-programmed to fail at the worst possible times. One of my friends had his Windows installation mess up last week (ahead of project deadlines), and one of my housemates had his hard disk fail today, taking his project work (which he has to present tomorrow) with it. He had saved an old copy on the university machines some weeks ago but it needs some work before it's ready to present.

This was why I always saved two copies of my coursework (in OpenDocument and MS Word formats), which was then copied to my pen drive and to the university servers too (which are backed up nightly, I believe). That way, short of Bradford getting vaporised by a nuclear warhead, I'd have a backup of some sort, and in any case myself and my tutors would probably also get vaporised so it would be a moot point anyway.

My computer, incidentally, is mostly fine, apart from ongoing heat issues. Since I'll be getting a Mac in a couple of months I'm not too worried.

A series of random things:

• Went to Manchester yesterday to do a spot of shopping - didn't really buy much but it was nice to get out of Bradford for once. Unfortunately it was raining quite heavily most of the time but I did get some nice photos which I'll be Flickrising shortly.
• Last night's Doctor Who was excellent - can't wait for the second part. It was written by Steven Moffat, writer of the sitcom Coupling. I've enjoyed the whole series so far but this one was one of the best.
• Today is a lazy day since I feel like I need one and for once I have no coursework to do. Yay!
• That said, as well as some Flickr uploads, I have OpenOffice.org to update to the latest milestone, and probably some other stuff to do.
• I nipped into the local supermarket today, mainly to stock up on loo roll since we're totally out of it. Strangely, toilet roll is next to pan scourers. I wouldn't like to get those mixed up.
• I've bought Paul McFedries Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture and Mark Frauenfelder's The World's Worst from Amazon. Only had time to read the first few pages of both but they seem interesting. The first one is about new words that have entered the English language recently (like 'frankenfoods', 'multi-task', 'hella' to name but a few), and the latter, written by one of the contributors to Boing Boing, is about "the most disgusting, hideous, inept, and dangerous people, places and things on earth", such as the chicken who managed to live for 18 months after being beheaded and the maddest 'mad scientist'.

Is it just me, or does this seem odd? Earlier I was using a computer with a SoundBlaster Audigy front panel that offers various professional audio inputs and outputs. And yet, the system has no sound card.

Seems a bit of a waste really, since I'm currently using a very similar system that has a sound card but no Audigy front panel. You'd think they could swap the panels around, or something.

For all the people searching for "armadillo" and "is this the way to armadillo", I do not have the MoD spoof video here. Sorry.

You can, however, view a clip of the video here at the BBC.

And here are some links for users of P2P clients:

• Magnet: link (Gnutella clients, Kazaa)


• ed2k link (eDonkey, eMule)

Shareaza users should use the magnet link, then right-click the download, choose 'Advanced' and then 'Advanced Edit' and then paste 'e769686b98647d3418fc8a0ee2fb898b' in the ED2K box, click 'OK' and then right-click again and select 'Find More Sources'. You may find, however, that Shareaza does this for you anyway.

Internal search is down for now because it's making the server slow and I don't want to incur the wrath of my hosting company.

If you can read this, then SharpMT is up and running on my Axim!

Apologies for the flurry of posts today - it's probably the first Sunday in a long time when I've not had any major pressing work to do.

Did you that under UK law, a product does not have to declare its alcohol content unless it is greater than 0.5%? Furthermore, several common brands of drinks actually contain alcohol, but are under the 0.5% limit - these include Tango, Lucozade, Schweppes Shandy, Vimto, Red Bull and Ribena.

Of course, you'd have to drink a lot of these drinks to be even slightly tipsy - most have less than 0.1% alcohol content and therefore you'd need to drink several litres before you begin to feel the effects. And since most of these contain large amounts of sugar, you're far more likely to be very hyper than drunk.

Is this a big deal? Well, that depends. I got the information from the web site of our local Halal supermarket, which serves the local Muslim community. Foods and drinks that contain alcohol are considered 'haram', or prohibited under Islamic teachings.

Today is a coursework mega-marathon day as I face the realisation that I have a large piece of work in tomorrow that still needs a lot of TLC before it's ready. Unlike some people I actually work better when I have music playing in the background, so as you can imagine music has played an important part in keeping me sane today.

Today's soundtrack has been the OST to the film "It's All Gone Pete Tong" and Alex Gold's album "Back From A Break" - both review copies for the student magazine. They're both mostly chillout albums which is just what I need right now, and good for listening to on a sunny day like today, even if I have to stay inside all day. Alex Gold's album is actually pretty good and is probably worth buying when it comes out.

Since my host was offering .info domains at a specially reduced rate of £2, I bought needssome.info. No real idea what to do with it but I suppose neil.needssome.info could be used for something in future.

wantssome.info was already taken.

Normally I'd leave this sort of thing up to Richard, but anyway...

On Monday 16th May (that's this coming Monday), the Bradford Make Poverty History campaign is creating a 'human wristband' around Bradford Town Hall in Centenary Square. We need around 300-or-so people to all turn up wearing white t-shirts (that's the important bit) at around 1pm. The local press should be there and hopefully it will send a powerful message to politicans that the British people want to see the end to world poverty. Similar events are happening around the country so if you're not local to Bradford you may find that somewhere closer to home is doing something like this.

If you're at the university, meet outside the J.B. Priestley Library at 12:30pm with your white t-shirt.

I got my first Google Adsense payment via Electronic Funds Transfer a few days ago, which despite being in 'beta' means it actually works. This means I no longer have to go to the bank to put in a cheque, and it means I'll get, on average, £12-£15 more per month, since Google actually gives me a very good exchange rate (52p to $1 last time) and don't take £10 in charges each time like my bank does. Over the course of a year, I should get an extra £140 that I wouldn't otherwise be getting. Nice.

And this is despite the fact that I block various less-than-ethical sites from advertising through URL filters - including an additional 4 sites added today which were selling hacked-up copies of LimeWire and Shareaza, which is at best unfair and at worst downright illegal.

Hope you have a good Bank Holiday Weekend.

Along with the new series of Family Guy, Seth Macfarlane has been working on American Dad, another animated mature comedy series in the same vein as Family Guy. The pilot episode has been available as a torrent from various sites for a while now so I grabbed myself a copy and took a look.

The main character is Stan Smith, a large, right-wing, gun-toting hunk who works for the CIA, and has a habit of bringing his work home with him. He has a glamorous but supportive wife Francine, a geeky son Steve and Hayley, his left-wing liberal teenage daughter. There's also Roger the alien who lives in the attic and was rescued from Area 51 by Stan, and Klaus the goldfish, whose brain was transplanted from an East German ski-jumper in a botched CIA experiment. In the pilot episode Steve tries to date a cheerleader but can't seem to manage it and seeks his dad's help.

As you'd expect, it is very much like Family Guy, in the same way that Futurama had quite a bit in common with The Simpsons (dude, Fox, a fifth season of Futurama would really rock, you know?), but I'm not so sure if I found it quite as funny. That might be because I watched one of the better episodes of Family Guy yesterday and still had that fresh in my mind, but in comparison I think Family Guy was the more humourous.

This is, of course, just the first episode, and I'd like to see a few more before making a final decision.

• My friend Will has a blog. Another one for Bradford Bloggers, perhaps?
• Still playing with the Axim. It's quite cool how it'll use whatever internet connection is present, whether that's through the computer it's plugged into, Wifi or Bluetooth.
• It's 3 years to the day that I first used Mozilla as a web browser. Time flies.

The past three days have been the nicest of the year so far - 17° Celcius (62°F) and glorious sunshine with barely a cloud in the sky. Definite short sleeves and t-shirt weather.

It's a little annoying that the nice weather tends to happen when I have major project deadlines looming - it means I have to stay inside huddled over a computer rather than basking in the sunshine with a cool drink and a barbecue. Sure, I have a laptop but the battery will only do 2 hours tops and there aren't many outdoor areas of campus with a decent Wifi signal (doing a web development assignment does imply having access to the web).

In any case, today looks to be the best day of the week. Rain is forecast for tomorrow morning and for Thursday and Wednesday doesn't look so good. Friday might be okay though, by which point I hope to have my final year project all-but finished.

I was surprised at just how lost I felt this morning when Bloglines wasn't working properly. I never realised just how much I relied on it. Thankfully it's up and running now but I've exported my subscriptions in OPML for use in another client in case it breaks again.

Looks like Ben was feeling a similar sense of loss too.

I have learned 3 interesting facts about the English language today:

• The phrase "to blow a raspberry" comes from the Cockney-rhyming slang "Raspberry Tart", which is used as a synonym for "fart". Although I've never heard anyone say "He raspberry tarted and stank the place out" before.
• "No strings attached" is actually a tailoring term, as explained by English Cut. When a piece of cloth is delivered with a flaw in it, a piece of string is attached to it. Therefore, a piece of cloth with no strings attached is a perfect piece.
• The plural of "OS" (the abbreviation of Operating System) is "OSes", based on this concensus. I sort-of knew this already but it's nice to have it validated.

Just want to welcome those of you coming over from today's LangaList. You may be interesting in my musings on Computing, spyware and spam, or you may just want to generally look around.

My stats aren't working at the moment so I can't get a clear picture of how this will affect my traffic but I'll post something soon. In any case, if this is your first time here, hope you enjoy looking around. :)

Here's my to-do list, in the style of Jay Allen:

• Meet _______ at ___ ____ on ______ to find a ______ for ____ ____.
• Finish ___________ my _______ and then _____ the ___________.
• Start _______ my ___ _______.
• Book an ___ ____.
• See ___ ______ about my ______.
• ______ the ____.
• Go to ___ ____ to ____ my ______ from ______.
• Plan __ ________ _____.
• Sort out _______ for _____ in ____ in ____.

As you can see, I'm going to be very busy in the next few weeks.

The original 'Crazy Frog' ringtone (a blatent rip-off of the insanity test) was annoying enough, and the insessant advertising made it even worse. My only relief was the 'death of crazy frog' video floating around on the internet.

But now, we have the Crazy Frog Version 2.0 Remix. Someone please kill me now.

Update: Please see The Origins of Crazy Frog.

Dave Shea is having a spot of bother with Canadian mobile networks. He wants a PalmOne Treo, but a complicated mess of contract periods, mobile standards and network policies seem to be getting in his way.

Having read that, I am very glad that the mobile system in the UK is much, much simpler, and has fewer lock-ins than Canada. Here's a table I've concocted to show the differences:

CDMA is slightly faster than GSM but doesn't make use of SIM cards so it's almost impossible to move an account between phones anyway. While locking of phones to a particular network's SIM card is common in the UK, there's a buzzing grey market in unlocking phones to work on all networks (although some legilation from the government or Europe banning locking on competition grounds would be nice). Although I've had 3 different phones in the past year (Nokia 3410, Sony Ericcson T300 and now Nokia 7250) moving between handsets has been a simple case of taking the SIM card out of one and putting it in the other. While unlocking does make the situation more difficult, on the whole, the user is the one who is in control.

Frank, over at Funtime Franky, had a similar experience when he emigrated to Canada last year. Phones were expensive to buy and there were lots of silly extra charges too.

Just like to wish everyone a Happy St Patrick's Day. On the right is a silly little remix of the Firefox logo I did in MS Paint especially for today - not quite sure why I did it but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing tonight but I'm sure it'll involve Teenage Kicks and a pint of Guinness.

Here's an interesting quote from an old episode of the Friday Night Armistice, which I've been enjoying thanks to the wonders of BitTorrent. This was from summer 1996, when the UK still had John Major as its Prime Minister and the Conservative party running its government - Labour, Tony Blair and 'Cool Britannia' wouldn't come until 1997.

The problem with the Tories though is that they've been in Government for like 17 years, and after 17 years in a relationship, things go a bit stale, don't they? We all know that, I mean, the first few years it's electric, you stay up all night making policies - it's just policies, policies - and then you can't keep your hands off their legislation, and then, you know, you start to cool off, you run out of ideas, you find yourself looking at other countries and wonder what it would be like to run them... it's sad, but it happens, doesn't it?

I think that sums up Labour's situation right now almost perfectly. :)

A week on Friday I will be 250 months old, according to Redate which tells you when various obscure anniversaries are approaching and how old you are in seconds, minutes etc. For example, I'm 0.08 plutonian years old. Glad I don't live on Pluto.

This is from NRT who is 400 months old today, and probably feeling very old after reading this.

Just want to say thanks for your headphone recommendations.

I went with the Sennheiser PMX60s that someone recommended - they were £12+£2 postage from some dude on eBay. Not bad when most places were asking about £25 for them and the price I paid was well within my budget.

I should get them within the next week or so - the seller didn't accept PayPal so I've had to post a cheque which will take a couple of days to arrive (what with it being a weekend) and a further few days to clear. eBay people: please enable PayPal or an equivalent system like Nochex on your auctions - it makes for less effort on both sides, since I don't have to write a check and post it, and you don't have to cash it in. It's also instantaneous - no postal delays, no clearance periods. Of course there's the PayPal fees, but the customer does save a few pennies on postage.

I also found a cable that'll let me use my big Sennheiser headphones that have been out of action for some time now. The cables are almost impossible to get hold of since they have a 3.5mm stereo jack at one end and a 2.5mm at the other, and most 2.5-3.5mm converters don't work because they don't fit in properly. If this cable does work then I'll have a very good pair for home use and a good pair for mobile iPod use.

I did come across an American eBay user selling Griffin's EarJams - attachments to your existing white iPod earphones to improve the bass and make them fit better in your ears - but at around £12 including international postage they were not much cheaper than the Sennheisers. And I'd be less of a target for muggers.

One of the jobs I do at work is to process requests for information from propective students - prospectuses (prospecti?), course booklets, that kind of thing. We often get requests from overseas where students have do not speak English as their first langauge but have been taught to communicate in a very polite and formal manner, which in itself is odd since most of the information requests come via email which is largely an informal communications medium.

Sometimes the politeness goes a little too far. I can't remember the exact contents of the email, but one I had to process today went something like this:

Sir, In the name of God I declare that I am [name], a boy of 21 years of age and a Nigerian citizen. I have heard many great testemonials about your exquisite school. I wish that you and your colleagues are in good health and that your elbows are well-greased.

I wouldn't exactly call the university 'exquisite', unless you're referring to the sandwiches in the student union bar, but I had to hold in the laughter when I read the elbows comment. I've never, ever heard that comment be made before as a compliment. Whoever taught English to this person is either very misguided or in a on a very cruel joke.

My cheap framed headphones that I've been using since last summer packed in on Sunday (or rather stopped working on one side) so I'm on the lookout for a new pair. I'm looking for something that roughly matches the following:

• Costs no more than £20 (and preferably under £15)
• Must be available from a reputable UK retailer (i.e. not eBuyer)
• Has resonable/good sound quality
• Has a frame of some sort

The last point is key, since bud earphones like those that came with my iPod Mini don't work with my ears. They only just stay in when I'm sat down - if I'm walking around, they constantly fall out. This has been a problem for me with any bud earphones and isn't specific to the iPod ones. Therefore, I need a frame to hold the speakers in place.

Headphones with earclips are another option but in the past I've found these to be uncomfortable and require more effort to put on.

I've never been a fan of my ears - compared with the rest of my head they're pretty large, and at school I occasionally got teased for it. If it were possible, and if I had more money than sense, I'd possibly consider having them re-shaped, but it's not something I'm too bothered with right now.

So yeah, headphones recommendations please :) .

Here's a challenge for you lot: See if you can get yourself a copy of a game called Supernoid. It's a game I created in The Games Factory about 5-6 years ago and released on the internet, but managed to lose all trace of. It's a clone of Arkanoid/Breakout that wasn't very good, and had a habit of crashing on the first level due to a Games Factory bug. It's Windows-only, before you ask.

If anyone can send me a copy of the zip file (look for Supernoid Full Edition 1.02 if you can) I'll be greatful.

Today's the fourth day of snow. There's a pretty good covering of snow on the ground now and there have been a number of local school closures. Hopefully the really cold weather today (between 1° and -2°C for Bradford) will stop the snow from melting, like it has previously.

Since we appear to have concluded that February is indeed in winter, here's a soundtrack for today - "Winter" by DT8 Project featuring Angela Britton.

Here's a quick question, which would probably only make sense to northern-hemisphere people: would you regard February as being in winter or spring?

Normally I'd say spring, but it's been snowing again today and it's bitterly cold outside. We haven't got a lot of snow but I'm taking my camera out nonetheless in case there's something interesting to photograph.

Interesting facts:

• St George, the patron saint of England, is actually from Turkish and Palestinian descent
• St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, is actually from Israel
• St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is actually from Britain
• St David, the patron saint of Wales, is from Wales

My mum forwarded this to me via email:

Dear Friend,
Please join me in sending an UnValentine's Day card and boycotting Terry's All Gold. The parent company of Terry's - Altria (formerly British American Tobacco) - is a company that has given $6.8 million in recent years to the Republican Party and George Bush; funded extremist right-wing groups; and lobbied against proposals to regulate corporations that profit at the expense of our health, environment and human rights. Terry's All Gold is the biggest selling boxed chocolate in the UK. Send an UnValentine's Day card by visiting http://www.owos.info/unvalentine/ to let Altria know exactly why you are doing it. Thank you for your support.

Terry's, as you may be aware, are based in my home town of York and their factory is only a few blocks away from where I used to go to school (although I gather they're in the process of closing it). York is also home to Nestle Rowntree, another confectionary company with very questionable ethical position (the ground of York City FC was recently renamed 'KitKat Crescent'). We're not doing that well, although on the plus side York is a 'Fairtrade town'.

If you're looking for a good mashup, try and get your hands on Boulevard of Broken Songs which mixes Green Day's awesome "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" with "Wonderwall" by Oasis, along with excerpts from a Travis and an Aerosmith track. The Bitzi link has links for Gnutella and eDonkey2000 clients, but there's probably a torrent for it out there too.

Also thanks to BoingBoing I'm digging Hayseed Dixie's bluegrass makeover of Motorhead's "Ace of Spades".

If like me you want to make pancakes today but have never done it before, you'll be pleased to know that Delia explains it in great detail. I'll be doing a couple after dinner tonight.

(For the unitiated, Delia Smith is the UK answer to Martha Stewart, except Delia lives in Norwich and not a prison cell)

Update: Pancakes went well, though I didn't realise until I started cooking that Delia's recipe is for 10-12 pancakes and I only wanted 2 (since one housemate had already eaten and the other is at a party), so I had to downsize the amounts quite a bit. First pancake was a bit of a disaster - I'd poured too much batter in and it got stuck halfway through being turned over and ended up as a bit of a mess, however I managed two more out of the remaining batter which both came out fine considering this was my first attempt. Thanks Delia! :)

Hope all you Yankees enjoy the Super Bowl - I'd watch it but at 11:20pm it's a bit late for a Sunday night, and besides, us UK people don't get to see the adverts. Which is surely the best part, right?

And by the way - who the hell is Gretchen Wilson? I caught a bit of the warm-up in the pub on Sky Sports and saw her performing. I can't say I've ever heard of her - this Gretchen is the only one I've ever heard of.

At the moment I'm really liking the mashup of Jay-Z's 'Encore' with Linkin Park's 'Numb', part of an album called Collision Course which has 5 more mashups using the same concept.

While I do like some of Linkin Park's stuff, I've never been a big fan of rap, however this song is brilliant - better than its two component parts, even though I did like Numb on its own. It sounds fresh and new and really stands out compared to other songs.

I have listened to a few songs from DJ Dangermouse's 'The Grey Album', the famously banned album which fused several of Jay-Z's tracks ('Encore' included) with elements of Beatles songs, but I didn't really like it.

I'm also liking "Battle without Honor" by Tomoyasu Hotei, which is the theme music to the menu on the Kill Bill Vol. 1 DVD, and "Jerk It Out" by Caesars Palace, the theme music to the TV commercials for the iPod Shuffle ("It's easy, once you know how it's done...").

With dance music dying a horrible death of late I've had to find some different new music to listen to, but thankfully there's some pretty cool stuff out there.

You know it's a slow news day when The Guardian devotes a fair part of page 6 to a picture of a cat stuck up a telegraph a pole.

On a recent trip to London, Jason Kottke ate kangaroo. Funnily enough, I had a kangaroo burger for dinner on Tuesday at Walkabout, a local Australian-themed bar. It was quite nice and was reasonable value for money - £5.50 with lots of chips and salad.

They also served crocodile, and 'kiwi lamb', which I gather is made from New Zealand sheep, not kiwis. I've not tried either but I have had crocodile pate before, which tastes a bit like chicken.

A recent conversation about Liberty University in Virginia, USA made me realise just how liberal some of the universities in the UK are. I'm going to use this post as a way of comparing them.

You know you're a little drunk when the randomly generated book title "Harry Potter and the Tribute band's Grape" leaves you in hysterics. For two whole minutes.

incidentally, I'm not the only one with that idea (thanks, Jonnie).

Apparently today is the most depressing day of the year, based on a calculation by someone from Cardiff University with too much time on his hands *. To quote:

He settled on January 24 after using an elaborate formula expressing the delicate interplay of lousy weather, post-Christmas debt, time elapsed since yuletide indulgence, failed new year resolutions, motivation levels, and the desperate need to have something to look forward to.

For me personally, today wasn't too bad. Tomorrow will be worse since I have my (one and only) exam, but today was spent in the pub, revising (honest!) with a couple of friends. I'm actually somewhat chilled out about the exam - while it's going to be a bit of an uphill battle I know that I don't have to do spectacularly to get a good mark. Though I was a bit peeved to learn that the hours I've spent learning about CGI.pm and HTML::Template have probably gone to waste as apparently Perl won't be in the exam :( . Still, it'll be useful for my final year project which needs quite a bit of Perl.

(* = Yes, okay, that's probably a bit rich coming from someone who saws phone books in half when he's bored...)

We got our new 2004/5 Yellow Pages yesterday, so rather than simply throwing the old one in the bin like any normal person would, I cut it in half with a bread knife.

I'm happy to report that it is snowing outside :) . Let's hope it settles so I can get some nice photos.

Unlike most other countries, us Brits are very pedantic about what we call a 'city'. Elsewhere, a city is a large town. But here, a city has to have a cathederal, or a royal charter from the Queen making it a city. This means you get some very large towns which can't become cities, and some cities which are no bigger than large villages, like Ely in Cambridgeshire.

I therefore propose a new system, based on something I heard some time ago on Home Truths on Radio 4:

• If it's just a group of houses, it's a settlement.
• If there is also a church, it is a hamlet.
• If there is also a pub, it is a village.
• If there is a branch of Woolworths, it is a town.
• And finally, if there is a branch of Marks & Spencer, it is a city.

What do you think - good system or bad?

According to this BBC news article, 25 billion text (SMS) messages were sent by Brits last year, 133 million of which were sent on New Year's Eve.

That means that last year, every person in the UK sent, on average, over 400 text messages. That's more than 1 a day!

Now while mobile phone penetration in the UK is now at something stupid like 90% of adults, that still leaves a significant number of people without mobiles. Furthermore, we can't assume that everyone with a mobile phone actually sends text messages - like my mum for instance who uses her mobile phone solely as a... erm... phone.

So if we assume that only 80% of the UK population actually sends text messages (we'll say 47 million people), the average per year rises to over 500 per year, or 10 a week. Now I know for a fact that I and many people I know don't send anything like that many, so there must be some serious texters out there.

I've been in a programming kind-of mood this evening, so I present The Random Harry Potter Book Title Generator. Every time you refresh the page a new title is generated from a series of random arrays. They range from those that might potentially be plausible ("Harry Potter and the Parchment of Misdemeanor") to the down-right stupid ("Harry Potter and the Asylum seeker of Ashby-de-la-Zouch"). If you're lucky, a real title will appear.

2005 is only about half an hour away (UK time), so I hope you all had a good 2004 and wish you a Happy New Year.

Someone's got a eBay affiliate advert for 'earthquake' on Google:

I have been following the news coming out of the asia-pacific rim - 20 000 deaths is the latest estimate.

I'm a few hours early, but Merry Christmas to everyone.

If you ever have the chance to try Pipers Crisps then I'd encourage you to get your hands on some. I had a packet of salt and cider vinegar flavour on the train back from London last Sunday and they were great - full of flavour. They're made from local Lincolnshire potatoes, are hand-cooked and use only natural ingredients.

GNER sell them on their trains, but you can also order them from their web site. If there's a crisp-lover in your family then I'm sure they'll make a good stocking filler. :)

(For the confused Americans reading this: crisps are potato chips)

I think I need a new mouse. I've had trouble with the USB plug for a couple of months now - if it's not plugged at exactly the right angle, it'll randomly disconnect and then reconnect - but now I've lost the ability to left click. You have to press the button several times before the click actually registers.

It's a Logitech mouse, and it is only two and a half years old, but it has had more than its fair share of abuse over the time that I've had it. I think it's about time for a new one. I'm certainly going to buy another optical mouse, since they're so much better than mice with balls, but I'm not sure whether to go wireless or not. USB would be a necessity as this machine doesn't have PS/2. And I would definitely buy Logitech again as they've served me well in the past. I don't want a Microsoft one though. This is the one I'm currently looking at, a black wireless optical Logitech mouse. It would certainly match mine and my parents' machines.

Update: Went for a black version of my current mouse for a bit under £12 delivered. I decided that I don't need a cordless mouse right now.

In the meantime, I'm using the left button on the trackpad for clicking - it's not convinient but it's better than nothing.

I'n now back in Bradford after seeing The Darkness (and Ash!) at Wembley Arena. Full report and photos on the way.

And for the trackback spammer who sent nearly 300 pings yesterday while I was away: **** you and the horse you rode in on. That is all.

(This post was brought to you by Alcohol™)

This post is a collection of small things that on their own aren't worthy of individual posts but that I'd like to share anyway.

While possibly putting myself at risk from lots of junk mail, I've found that I can order a free bottle of Original Source shower gel and a free travel-sized bottle of Head and Shoulders.

In the abscense of anything else interesting to post, I'd like to wish my American counterparts a Happy Thanksgiving. :)

Just make sure you don't eat all the turkey, some of us Brits might want some at Christmas. ;)

For some reason iTunes has started playing The Darkness far more than usual. "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" seems to come on at almost every session. Odd.

incidentally, I'm going to see them play at Wembley Arena on the 11th December. Should be fun.

And no, I won't be wearing spandex. That would just be wrong.

Okay, so being able to buy 'women' on eBay was funny. But this is taking the piss:

This was sent to me in an email:

shut up u anti-american morally corrupt winy liberal dumbass, the americam ppl have spoken and they voted bush, u guys are just bitter cos u lost. kerry is a loser, long live bush

I'd make some witty comment about that but I don't really think I need to - it's hilarious enough as it is. Still, I'm quite impressed that someone actually took the time to tell me that.

If you have chance, try to get hold of a copy of "Wonderful Life" by Ordinary People feat. Tina Cousins. It's a song I first heard a few years ago and had as an MP3, but was lost when my HD packed in on me a couple of months back.

The song is quite rare, having not really been released anywhere much - it appeared on a South African dance music compilation and that's about it. Consequently it's taken a while for me to find some way of downloading it again. It's a cover of a song originally by Black but is in a very different style, and I really like it. You may too if dance music or electronica is your thing.

If the name Tina Cousins rings a bell it's because she's done a couple of singles with German eurodance outfit Sash! ("Mysterious Times" and "Just Around The Hill" ) and also released a solo album, which incidentally is quite good. She's now signed to All Around The World and should have a new single called "Hymn" out sometime soon.

I've submitted the song to Bitzi so you can use your preferred file sharing client to download it - here's its ticket page. I'd love to tell you where you could buy it but I haven't found anywhere on the internet selling it.

Recent events reminded me of this