Beneath the cut is swearing and bile induced by Thameslink's utter contempt for their customers on the Sutton loop, so if you're offended by that kind of thing, just don't click and don't read it.
Thameslink: What a festering pile of oozing pustules they are. They appear to show nothing more than total contempt for the customers using the Sutton loop. The past few days there has been some heavy rain in London which has flooded the Kings Cross tunnel. So, quite obviously, Thameslink can't run trains through. OK, so they run three shuttle services, not hard really. But for the first 1.5 days they advise that travellers don't travel unless absolutely necessary. This morning, they change the advice a little to say that an emergency timetable is still in operation and that for those of us on the Sutton loop there will be one train per hour going through Wimbledon. However, they don't say anything about _when_ that one train will be passing through any fucking stations. The do tell you that that one train may, however, be cancelled at short notice! So I assume you're just supposed to turn up at the station and hang round for up to 59 minutes to see if a train will show up or not. This, plus the fact that during engineering works on the Sutton loop we just never get replacement buses... I seriously bloody well hope that none of the money from my annual TfL travelcard actually gets to those Thameslink bastards.
Well, the 99% makes nice hot chocolate. 1/4 bar per mug, plus a bucket of sugar seems to work fine. Maybe some brandy would have been nice, but I don't keep any. Hm. Whisky might suffice next time.
[as an aside, I've composed this three times now and lost it due to Netscape crashing. not amused.]
Anyway, this 99% cocoa stuff. All it is is pressed cocoa powder with a bit of cocoa butter to bind it together. Sold amongst the other Lindt, so definitely not in the cooking section of the supermarket. However, it tastes _vile_. Even the "tasting notes" on the packaging recommend letting a very small piece dissolve on your tongue. Probably because that makes it a bit harder to spit out. So, why on earth is it sold, and marketed, as eating chocolate? And how come I can find it on only the Italian section of the Lindt websites? It it only an Italian palate that can, er, palate it?
I'm sure it'll make good hot chocolate, though. With a whole load of milk and sugar.
It's all well and good blanket condemning war as completely unneccessary but sometimes... well, just read this practical German.
So, I went to the Divine Comedy gig at the London Palladium last night. Well. Um. The 15 piece ensemble was a great idea. Perfect for playing a lot of stuff from Fin De Siecle and A Short Album About Love. The gig (someone's photos of it here) was being filmed and recorded for a DVD. Bad. Very bad. The mixing desk was on the stage, instead of at the back of the venue, so the mix was wrong. Neil was too quiet, the bass, kit and sometimes the other guitarist was too loud. And don't get me started on the backing singer. She looked like Martine McCutcheon from where I was sitting and the times I could hear her... eurgh. She was not the right sound at all. Oh no.
And what was up with Neil? He was almost listless at times. Very low energy compared with when I saw him at Shepherd's Bush (we don't talk about the dual-headline gig with Ben Folds where Neil seemed to get quite fed up with the audience being so rude and unenthusiastic when he was playing - because around 80% of the crowd were there for ben Folds and not The Divine Comedy). I'm thinking the venue may have had more than a little contribution to that. Fully seated, in cramped rows so lacking in leg room that your kness (well, mine and the guys on either side of me) touch the seats and/or backs/heads of the people in front. It really isn't conducive to a great atmosphere, it turns it into more of a polite little Richard Clayderman affair. It felt more than a little wrong not to be jumping up and down like a loon when the opening bars of "Tonight We Fly" kicked off.
I'm guessing that the sound quality and mix will be a ball park better on the DVD, given that it seems to have been the primary function of the gig and the location of the desk etc. Time will tell.
Woohoo! TOX got caught. And fined. And put away for a bit. And slapped with an Anti Social Behaviour Order for 5 years.
These insect bites I appear to have acquired in Italy are really not fun. One has turned into a big dark red/purple bruise-like thing and another into a painful, teeny little bump that is quite sore (and sometimes mad itchy). I even heard the little bugger that was responsible for them, buzzing right next to my ear one night. I thought I'd hit it, but obviously not before it managed to take chunks out of me.
Still, at least the air conditioning works in the office, unlike in the hotel room. Hmph.
Which reminds me of the hotel I stayed in the weekend before heading off to Italy...
Don't ever be tempted to book in to Best Western Abbey Hotel, 1 North Parade, Bath, BA1 1LF Really. When I arrived, I was told that to get breakfast before 8am on Sunday, I needed to use room service and there would be a form to fill in in my room for it. There wasn't, so on the way out to the wedding reception, I told the woman on reception that I was missing said form and she said there would be one put in my room for me before I got back that evening. It wasn't. I got back pretty late and was too tired to argue about it. Then I discovered that 50% of the lights in the room didn't work and that the main light in the bathroom didn't work either. So I had a shower almost in the dark. All night, the pigeons and seagulls were amazingly noisy just outside my window and people yelling in the street until 2am wasn't that nice either. And then the people coming back from whatever to rooms near mine were audible as if they were in my room. Having to leave at around 8am the next morning, I had no time to stand and chat about my issues with the place with the staff. Nor did I have any energy seeing as I'd had very little sleep.
And they had the cheek to charge £75 a night for this. OK, so it is Bath, but this is ridiculous. Given that I had no feedback form, as well as no breakfast form, to fill in to express my dissatisfaction, I can't even feel better about having been able to get my point across to the hotel management.
And here they are. 4 cups of tea down and I'm starting to feel human. Might get around to processing these photos instead of just rotating the ones taken landscape... eventually. Well, OK, Photoshop Elements roared through processing them so I let it. Full sized versions can be found here in the photography section if the ones in the album aren't big enough for you.
Thank god. Real tea. I'm back. Photos uploading as I type...
So. Off to a wedding tomorrow then a fast morning run on Sunday down from Bath to Heathrow. A week in Italy next week. Mm. God, I'm tired.
Confused as to how and/or why my journal is syndicated by Livejournal. It looks like it started in the early hours of this morning. Is this an automatic thing, due to Moveable Type settings, or did someone do this manually? I have no idea. That's why I'm asking.
...and the mystery is solved. The culprit tracked down pretty quickly. Tsk. And, indeed, hmph ;o)
They do. They conspire against me. And cause me physical pain.
I was out for lunch today and swung by John Lewis to get inspiration for wedding presents for this weekend. Lord alone knows how I ended up in the blinds section, but I did. And I ended up buying a couple.
You see, having cats who get away with blue murder means that net curtains aren't really an option. The kitties often are found beating some poor moth to death through the net curtains, leaving puncture marks and pulls where they couldn't remove their claws cleanly. Or on occasion, having jumped up on to the top edge of an open window and decided it was time to get down again, missed the jump back to a safe surface and grabbed on to the nets on the way down, shredding them horribly. So, in order to maintain privacy while allowing daylight through and not looking like a tramp decorated the place, light/pale/fine blinds are a Good Alternative. That's my story for the bedroom one (white voile roller blind with dotted gold circles on it) and I'm sticking to it.
So, while I was putting up the brackets, I ended up skinning most of the knuckles on my right hand (and dripping a teeny bit of blood onto the blind, oops),l and puncturing a few bits of other skin, due to the fact that the brackets needed to be right up against the sides of the window recess in order for the blind to fit properly. There just wasn't enough room for my hand in between the screwdriver and the wall, so scraping of skin ensued. Oh and achey biceps from screwing in the brackets being really rather difficult. And a blister on the palm of my right hand from the rotation of the screwdriver while huge pressure was being put on it.
The blind (Roman style, cream, self-patterned with teeny squares) in the lounge is now replacing the curtains. This is purely because I didn't want to have to trim around 10cm off the blind (ready made come in 180cm or 150cm and I really needed 165 or thereabouts) as that would have involved cutting fabric, snipping the wooden spines, hack-sawing through the metal rail and then hemming the fabric where it was cut. In addition to that, if I'd put the blind in the recess, I'd either have it in 50% of the depth of the recess, or screwed into the plastic around the windows, neither of which is ideal. Basically, sod that. So I screwed the brackets into the masonry above the window and ditched the curtain rail and curtains. I don't need to block out incoming light in the lounge very much anyway, it isn't as if anyone sleeps in there, or even could at the moment now that the sofa bed is gone. So. Blinds it is and the room looks much lighter for it.
You've heard of Gmail, right? Well, there appears to be a phenomenal fuss being kicked up by technically ignorant people about the service.
Webmail costs money to run. Especially when you offer each user up to 1GB of storage for their crashingly mundane text. So, how to fund a free webmail service of that magnitude? Sell advertising. But advertising is low budget on the web, so you won't get much per ad. Unless you follow the modern realisation that well-targetted advertising is far more effective than randomly bludgeoning people with adverts for things in which they would never have any interest. So, if you could parse the content of the users' email conversations and target ads based on that, you'd have some pretty mean leverage in the advertising marketplace, yes?
Well, duh. Of course you would. And that's how to sell sdvertising at a higher price per impression (page view) than the bog-standard rate, actually make money out of the venture and provide a 'free' service.
Now, the technically ignorant will not be able to distinguish between a human reading email and a totally automated system which just grabs words, applies an algorithm and decides on adverts appropriate to the email content. And the technically ignorant will not be equipped to make the microscopic intuitive leap to the thought that it doesn't matter that a machine has run through your email to look for words to hang on to to try to sell you stuff because machines don't care. Machines know about the content of your mail anyway. There will almost certainly be spam and/or virus filters at some point in the chain for most people's email these days, never mind the routing between the originating maching and final destination. It is, in fact, nothing at all like the Royal Mail steaming open your post, reading it and then stuffing the envelope with junk mail because no human being is involved in reading the emails. (They'd die of bordeom anyway. 99.99999% of email is brain-meltingly mundane, especially given that 40% is spam anyway.)
Then there's the issue of storing large numbers of people's email. Um. Microsoft (Hotmail) and Yahoo and the like already do this. They already can search through your email for whatever they like. And has anyone kicked up a huge, public fuss about them? Well, er, no. So what is so wrong with Gmail?
If you really take the paraniod viewpoint, Google could be building up some kind of profile on me, based on my email and Internet searching habits, and tied to my identity. I mean, let's face it, the cookies are cross-referenceable so it wouldn't be hard. But why would they want to? Why would they be interested in individuals? There's no point. Generic types of people, granularised down to not an immense level would be needed to target ads effectively for Google's real, paying customers - the advertisers. (Well, OK, it doesn't quite work like that, but they really really don't need to care to link together your various interests etc. to target ads successfully. per email is all they need to do it for.) That's all they really need. Any more than that would be a complete waste of resources. And resources mean money, so it isn't in their interest to do that. Even if they were being thoroughly evil, and illegal I think, and selling on information about individuals without the individuals' consent, it wouldn't be awfully useful or lucrative.
So, yes, no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for Gmail by agreeing to have text adverts targetted by context sensitivity, but you already get that with Google searches and it is well targetted and unintrusive enough not to bother all that many people. More's the point, you are made aware of that up front. From what I've played with in the Beta of Gmail, it is well worth while. Fastest webmail I've ever seen, competitive in speed with a desktop mail client. Only webmail I've ever seen with keyboard shortcuts (very very very cool). In short, I like it and I wish people would quit it with the pseudo-technical, uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to it. Especially Senator Liz Figueroa in California. Get a clue, darlin'!
Pleeeease, Mr. Tax Man, stop sending me self-assessment notices every year. (And if you are going to do it, for god's sake get my name right 'cause I've told you twice already.) I don' wanna. I hate it. It drives me nuts.
This year is going to be the easiest so far, because I actually had just the one job in the tax year this time, but old employers did stupid things like refund my pension contributions because they'd forgotten to set me up the^W a pension (stop right there, no, we do not get signal or move zig for great justice) and that's going to hurt. *wail*
Ahhh, I am released. The long weekend on call is over. It wasn't _too_ bad, barring a wee panic on Saturday, until getting woken up at 07:30 today when my laptop decided it had had enough and was on a Go Slow. I wish I could have gone back to bed afterwards, but I'm awake now. Seeing as I didn't go to sleep until just after 01:00 this morning, I'm not exactly bright eyed and bushy tailed now.
The new boy starts today and I don't get to poison his mind for two weeks, given that I'm on call this week and on holiday (yay!) next week. Dammit, I'm nosey! I want to know what he's like. Mmm, maybe Friday beers this week after I get off call. Worth a shot, I guess.
Cron is just perfect and I love it. It is simple and it works. For repetitive, timed jobs that I don't want to be doing manually. Of course then there is the argument on cron vs. at. at very much has a place in my heart, too. One shot wonders, use at. Nuff said.
Why I particularly love cron at the moment is that it is helping me in dealing with blog spam. Cron and some scripts, as is alwayas the way. You see,bots (and real people) who spam journals with random adverts for various pills and potions and suchlike need to be automagically killed. It got boring really quickly, cleaning up other people's dirty mess. I'm working on the automatic profanity clean up in comments, but there are times when I think I might want to manually over-ride that. For now, I think picking up on dodgy and plain rude keywords it has been fed will be enough. Yes. For now. Subject, body and sender. That seems to be keeping it mostly clean so far. I'll trawl through logs to see how much tidying up is going on at some point. There is learning to do, obviously, but that is how spamtraps need to be. I may end up simply using timed auto-close on comments. Who knows.
So I saw Monster yesterday afternoon. What a phenomenally grim, dark and depressing film. Very good - I can appreciate that - but I didn't like it. I guess I wouldn't normally choose to watch something like that, but 50 First Dates wasn't on the cards and there was nothing else showing that grabbed my attention. But I really did need to do _something_ in my last afternoon of freedom before the Easter weekend on call. Still, there are a couple of good looking films coming out soonish, in May I think: Hidalgo and Van Helsing.
And in other news, Cat A has a big scraped patch between his shoulder-blades, which apprears to be irritating him a bit, so he scratches lumps of fur off. Not too irritated that he's unsettled and/or not eating and/or not behaving mostly normally. It looks clean and smells fine so I'll continue to keep an eye on him and if it gets worse, it's off to the V. E. T. for him.
Why are people so intent on mutilating their/other people's bodies in the name of beauty? For God's sake, stop it!
Small fight with the upgrade last night. The back plate, through which the ports dangle, needed changing for the new mobo to fit the case. Thing is, they're really rather difficult to get out. And more so to put in when you've already screwed it up once and got a little bit of metal pushed the wrong way around so that you have to undo all the motherboard screws and riser card screws again, pull out one drive bay and re-insert the back plate while the motherboard is about 3mm away from where you're waving a screwdriver quite violently. Eh anyway, it took a bit longer than anticipated and there was NIC oddness which annoyed me somewhat. Why upgrading a bunch of hardware, but keeping the old NIC meant that all the network settings got wiped... *sigh*
All done now and when I download some demos tonight, to show off just how cool the Radeon is, and a bunch of benchmarky things, I'll savour the smell of flaming rubber. I hope. Aaah, not a lot better than geek-lust sated.
She is arrived. Ohyes. Well, the whole bundle of part 2. The coolest bit is that the dudes at Komplett do give you a single 512MB DIMM instead of two 256MB ones. Nice boys, they are.
So, that's my evening of geekery all set up. I was going to see if there was anything to do/see on my last night of freedom before going on call over Easter, but I couldn't find anything and then this little lot arrived.
Oh, and I remembered what it was I wanted to rant about the other day... a headline I saw over someone's shoulder on the tube of a quote, along the lines of "get Spanish troops out or rivers of blood will flow". I just haven't the energy to articulate my thoughts about it now. Suffice to say I think it is mind-bendingly offensive.
First class is starting to get cooler... GNER are rolling out ten Wi-Fi locos.
Today is being... thing. I got woken up at 6am, by overly-affectionate kitty, then dozed on and off until I really had to get up at 8.20am. So, I didn't quite get as much sleep as I'd've liked. And the major task for today is turning out to be as much of a pain in the arse as I thought it might be. Lots of fiddly little bits that just aren't correct.
What's even more annoying is that I was thinking about something I wanted to talk about this morning and I've forgotten what it is now. So, now I'm even grouchier. Still, I managed to catch a silly mistake in my online shopping where I'd just forgotten to change the units on the apples from kg to units. Almost ended up with 4kg of apples there.
Ooh! The Radeon has landed. And rather heavily. When the parcel showed up I was quite concerned about the phenomenal weight of it. A large proportion of the weight is, in fact, cabling, connectors and gender/connector type changers. Even without all of that gubbins, the card itself is impressively heavy, due to the quite extensive heat sink.
I won't be installing it until the rest of the new kit turns up, so that I get the full, improved speed effect in one big hit. *anticipate*
I finally caved in and ordered some stuff to upgrade my gaming and general purpose PC. New mobo, CPU, RAM, fan and graphics card:-
- AMD Athlon XP3000+ 2.167 GHz Socket A 333MHz, 512KB Barton
- Asus A7V8X-X mainboard Socket A DDR LAN VIAKT400, ATA/133, ATX, USB2.0, 8X AGP
- TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 512MB CL2.5 Memory 184-P (for DDR-PC400MHz)
- Spire CPU-Fan WhisperRock IV Socket A SPA04B4 For AMD up to XP 3200 Mhz
- ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB DDR DVI/TV-Out
*drool*
This Moveable Type thing really really isn't hard. I mean. It practically installs itself. Even a Windows admin could do it. Sorry, that's mean(ish). There are some very competant ones out there. God knows it's a monster to admin and secure a Windows domain. I know; I used to do a chunk of that for what was, at the time, the largest Windows NT domain - by user count - in the world. But still, package management on Windows means that you aren't routinely compiling things like MySQL from source so it can be a little scary. But even with *NIX, you don't need to do that. Binary Packages Are Available and package management exists, some of it even useable.
OK, so I said I'd never leave hand-coding HTML for this here journal, but given that the rest of the site is maintained by hand and the stylesheets etc. for the journal help keep my hand in with CSS at least. Eh, the march of progress. Speaking of which, there's this lovely upgrade bundle at Komplett which is calling to me, almost inexorably (is that possible? hm.)...
While looking into a solution for online photo management for my mother, I've found one I actually don't hate. It's called, originally enough, Gallery. Hoorah. Downloaded it, installed it, configured it and dumped all of my existing online photos in it. Go me.
Today is the day for all good jokes and pranks, starting here at Google.