Create something new? Check.

Please do not copy? Erm… yeah

I guess if anyone’s going to use lolcats in an advertising campaign then the RSPCA is a natural choice.

Anyway, I’m dating a redhead right now, which is a particular weakness of mine. Personally, I blame the media.

It wasn’t a one-step process though, since Helen’s naturally a pretty dark brown. So we had to make her blonde first! Or, as it turned out, a kind of washed-out ginger.

Now while I’m sure before and after photos will be easy to acquire from Helen herself, I doubt she’ll be too keen to see the “during” spread about.

Eeeeeyes right~

Also: while the management feel I perhaps have more useful things to do with my time, a Core 2 Duo machine doesn’t fucking break a sweat running those animations. It uses about 4% of one core, according to the activity monitor. God dammit I want a new mac!

So, this came to me while walking about, bear with me.

You see, web 2.0 is all about communities and shit, and that’s great. It’s also all about web-browsers, and making them do things they weren’t designed to do, which is also great (if you can do it right).

However, web-browsers are pretty clumsy tools, and you often end up scanning a pretty packed page for one little bit of information… for a dozen different pages. As such, my idea was this: what if you had an app that checked all your social networking sites, all your forums, all your email, and presented it in one unified interface?

I’m picturing a clean interface which immediately presents the user with a summary of what has happened on the interweb since they last looked. New photos of Britney’s third baby on her flickr, Brad’s snide comments on Emmy’s latest LJ entry, a PM from l33tcl0ud on the gentoo forums asking where you found those drivers, a friend request on facebook from some kid you sat next to at lunch once: all of it sat in one place, waiting your eager young eyes.

Of course, it’d be a complete bastard to set up, mostly because APIs for such websites are few and far between. Which is pretty fair, really – if your sole source of revenue was from pairing eyeballs with adverts, would you make it easy for someone to suck just the information they wanted off your server into a program?

OK, I would too, but that’s because I’m a beautiful young idealist whose startup would flop quicker than a penis on a British nudist beach.

So, I went to Manchester yesterday. I parked illegally in Derby near the station and availed myself of a train. I have not been punished and I feel this sets a bad example to the children.

In Manchester I got to talk to a judge (no, not a judge, sadly), I bought an overpriced cheesecake, watched someone watch people, read poems laid into the pavement, played amongst children in the science museum, stroked my chin in the art gallery and drunk a beer in the Hard Rock Cafe. It was a day of experiences, for sure.

In the evening, on the way back to the station, I espied a comic shop, still open at 8pm. Inside the shelves had all been pushed back and tables filled the floor: at these, nerds were playing games with some kind of collectible cards. At first I ignored these strange people, indulging in such an alien past-time, and merrily scoured the new comics for those which I follow. It soon became apparent, however, that these were very much my kin. On one table a man argued vehemently with his fellow the necessity of sharpening wolverine’s claws, on another a small conclave pondered the true identity of Supernova, one young man quoted a Penny Arcade strip to the room in general.

Speaking of nerdiness, I did it again. Only, now that your trust has been earned I stuck some less… accessible stuff in this one. Sure, they might not open as strong as the last batch, but if you stick with it then the truth of the word will become clear.

Now that’s what I call Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle – volume two
Patient notes: I’m upping the dosage of AAC in this one. You responded well to the last treatment, you should be proud.

So, I got my bluetooth headphones working with my phone, finally, which is neat.

Only, it’s not.

See, the remote controls on the headphones are received by the bluetooth stack and passed on to the media player… as screen taps. Thing is, I’m not using Windows Media Player (no AAC support, seriously), which is what the bluetooth stack uses for its reference as to where it should tap. So no remote control.

Also, this device is kind of underpowered, so streaming music slows everything else right the hell down. Some times it can’t even cope with that, at which point it sort of stutters then catches up with itself. I gather that this can be fixed by ramping up the CPU with a third-party hack, but hey, constant bluetooth streaming is raping my battery hard enough as it is, you know?

I’m totally hanging onto them though, they ought to work very well with my next phone, or my other next phone.

On the bright side, I’m eating some really nice chicken/pepper/hoi sin/rice noodle stir-fry that I just made, it’s gloriously sunny outside, and Derby continues to boast some very bizarre graffiti.

I’m in Belper, babysitting puppies (puppysitting?). My mother’s dog gave birth to a litter of thirteen (her third, and possibly final) in the wee hours of this morning, so it’s once again time for a round-the-clock vigil in case the dozy bitch sits on one of them (seriously, she does it worryingly often).

Right now they’re little blind rats that seek only to suckle at a teat full of delicious dog-milk (full of goodness, vitamins and marrow-bone jelly). However, thirteen puppies minus eight dog-nipples (ten including my own) leaves some leftovers, so it is also my duty to rotate the little buggers.

On the plus side, there is WiFi in the house, and chocolate, so I’m not really missing out on much.

In other news: Jack bought himself a domain! manwhat.com is live right now, and I think it’s a pretty cool domain. Now if only he’d put something cool there I could sleep easily.

There was something else… I know there was. Oh well.

Also: some ladies in the queue at passport control accused me of being American. We’d nearly reached the end of the queue when one of them said aloud “Oh, I thought you were American, or Canadian or something”. At this point I was yet to utter a single word in the presence of these women. Not one. So this raises two questions.

1. Why exactly did I seem to be American? Perhaps… the way I walked?

2. She thought I was, but did not any longer. What did I do to change her mind, still without opening my mouth?

This has happened before, actually. A cashier at Asda suspected me of being a Cypriot, and a loss-adjuster suggested I was of Californian extraction, though in both cases this was after I spoke. Perhaps I exude some… air of foreign-ness? My mind is addlepated (or possibly addle-plated, which would at least increase its resale value).

I think that about covers it. Any questions?

Good. Now back to reality, with exams and red meat and very little cheese.

The image gallery, it is… it is alive!

So, basically I took the RumGallery plugin for WordPress, threw some hidden divs and some sneaky JS to do the floating frame, warped the HTML some more to make it show the root browser tiled like that, and butchered the PHP considerably so it’d show that little menu at the top for all the galleries.

All in all I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, despite a whole bunch of setbacks. The most notable of which was Transmit suddenly deciding to replace my meaty stylesheet with an empty file.

An empty fucking file.

But it’s all better now, so go check it out. Just click the “pictures” link up the top to be presented with, you know, a bunch of pictures.

Maybe if I’m brave next weekend I’ll beat the chess server into submission.

Something else I’m feeling is really sick. Like, unwell. I’ve not had a cold this bad in ages, perhaps this one is even bona-fide flu? I do not know, but it hurts.

I find myself thinking:
would the phone look cooler in aluminium,
or the Powerbook in that gunmetal finish?

This could be karma from The Steve, of course, since I went and switched over to the Dark Side. Since I moved to Mac back in 2001, before they started calling it “switching”, the only Microsoft product I’ve used with any regularity is a mouse (a very good mouse it was indeed, the company is wasted on software). That is, until now! I am now the proud owner of a Windows Mobile PDA-phone, specifically the HTC Magician (or whatever it’s being re-branded as today).

What can I say? It is both small and fast, the screen is large and lush, A2DP support… it even runs Skype <3. It rocks so hard!

Of course, the camera’s a step down from the k750i, and Windows Mobile 2003 is frankly horrible, but I can deal with the former and I am slowly bending the latter to my implacable will…

That aside last weekend was still pretty win. I met Matt and his room-mate (who is the hottest guy ever), I stole music and DVDs, we played some DOA, I was forced to watch Dune, prodigious quantities of fast-food and alcohol were consumed and I saw one of those guys painted up pretending to be a statue. Only he was the worst statue ever, because he was moving around and singing.

We also went to the coolest bar in the world! There was leather and pale wood as far as the eye could see, a stubbly and knowledgeable antipodean barman who furnished us with free snacks pretty much on tap, the music was pleasing and quiet enough that voices needn’t be raised. In short, it was everything a bar should be, apart from the small matter of a £250 annual membership fee. Though, I think you totally get your money’s worth.

Other things of note:
- Matt has a sucky TV
- Some girl on the train home totally fancied me
- Real cities are much bigger than Derby
- chocolate tastes better when it belongs to someone else and is out of date
- Cardiff is bought and paid for by the Umbrella Corporation

I went to a funeral last week for my great-uncle Tony, and later a wake. The whole thing was phenomenally depressing, but the thing that sticks in my mind from the whole day is the sign that Tony’s son had made reminding guests to shut the garden gate lest the family dog get out.

Is there something wrong about that? I mean, in a period of mourning the thoughts that filled my head were “So does that mean I can leave it open? And how is the dog supposed to read that?” I’m going to call it inappropriate humour syndrome, which doesn’t have a cool acronym. Suggestions are welcome, though alternatives escape me even more so than the ability to mourn.

Oh, and Batman totally fixes the washing machines where I work. How cool is that?

The time for talking has passed, the time for action is upon us!

I don’t know about you, but I am fucking sick of putting on a pair of socks only to discover a hole in one or both large enough to accommodate a scared and wounded fox. Not only does it present me with that which I fear most, a choice of my course of action (do I find another pair, or tough it out like a real man?), but each solution is what you might call sub-optimal.

So yeah, I’m not pulling any punches now, you sock-faced bastards. From now on, every single sock I find with a hole in not only gets thrown away, it also condemns its fellow regardless of whether the other sock has a hole. Hopefully this will serve as an example to the other socks, show them that the limits of my mercy have been reached. Perhaps it’ll even get that pair of jeans with the dodgy zip to buck up its ideas.

Of course, following the course of action as outlined above would be foolish to say the least, had I not some plan of procuring replacements. Very soon I would have no socks at all and be forced to travel everywhere barefoot, lest I make my shoes all stinky. As it is, I just got paid, so I’m feeling wealthy enough to decree that for every three pairs of socks thrown away I shall buy four more. They shall be lush and thick, for winter creeps ever nearer, and come in a panoply of colours (though with more than a few hewn from darkest black, since black goes with everything).

Which is like American graffiti, only more touching. You see, English graffiti artists worry about your drinking, would rather you didn’t spiral into drug addiction, and would like to show you the way to Amarillo. This could well be because they’re good-natured robots, trying to protect humanity, though perhaps their pun chips are malfunctioning?.

Oh, in other news, some tenant showed me his website the other day. Well, I asked to see it, since he was griping at having had to pay for it, which may or may not have been related to only having half of September’s rent lying around, but anyway.

For the princely sum of one hundred and seventy pounds sterling he’s got 2 years of hosting, a whopping 120Mb of space in which to place things that might be hosted and a professional designer to build his site for him. At this point I was thinking that the site must have been something special, since my Dreamhost account is £100 for two years and has more or less 20 times the web-space, so I ask to see his site. He fires up IE and it goes straight there, it is the man’s home page after all. Then, as I was reeling from the shock, he delivered the killing blow: he plans to learn flash in order to improve this….. thing, and also hopes that his computing course will teach him how to programme websites. I mumbled something about leaving the oven on and fled before I had a chance to soil myself with uncontrollable mirth.

1. the 7 hours driving to get there, then again to get back
2. the god-damned awful weather!

Still, the house we stayed in was really cool, despite being not-yet finished. All pale wood, massive windows, stainless steel and funky lights: very modern. it’s in a little place called Trewetha, near Port Isaac, where you can buy all manner of Cornish fudge (they make it with clotted cream, for extra heartburn), and they serve really huge portions of fish, chips and peas. Also, there was some ITV drama filmed there, though I’ve not seen it.

On Saturday we met up with Isis and her wacky Cornish friends in Truro and I got yiffed by a real-life furry. He was a comical, vaguely ironic and self-depreciating furry though, so I didn’t feel the need to bleach myself clean. Actually, he’s hilarious. Over dinner we goaded him into coming on to the waitress in the most blatant way possible, which, though likely quite humiliating for the poor girl, was funny as hell; if you’re ever LARPing in Cornwall and fancy a quick yiff you could do much worse for yourself…. or something.

We ate in this place called a Meadery, which is basically a Beefeater family pub type thing, only all medieval-themed and they sell mead. It’s pretty authentic, to a point, with the food served on wooden plates and all sorts of shields and such on the walls. I also heard tell of having to tear the food asunder with one’s bear hands, though we were all issued with cutlery, perhaps because we looked like savages just one step away from total cultural reversion. This musty authenticity was oddly juxtaposed, however, with cheesy pop music, waitresses in skanky greb-belts and a giant papier-mâché castle marking the entrance to the toilets. Oh, and laminated menus. I don’t mean to whine, since it was pretty cool, but I just feel they could have gone the whole hog and made it so much cooler. Although, now that I think about it, how many people would eat in restaurant with lute music piped over the speakers?

Also, I got all manly on Sunday and fixed bits of my car all on my own. Well, the bits I could fix with a screwdriver, clamp and hacksaw anyway. So yeah, now I can tug at the cigarette-lighter thingy all damn day and it will stay firmly attached to the car, which is a relief.

So yeah, cynical film. Well-written and acted though, and thus very enjoyable.

Slightly before that (Saturday – actually a part of the weekend) I went to see The Hitchhikers’ Guide movie. Now, I’ll keep this brief since every man and his dog has posted their opinion of this film somewhere, but basically I liked it. I liked it enough to overlook the slightly dodgy acting, and the somewhat forced feel to the film’s romantic element, that’s for sure. It’s also worth mentioning that yes, the film’s plot is different to that of the book, but what most seem to forget is that the book’s plot is different to that of the radio play, which was different to the TV series, which was different to the graphic novels. It is still very much The Guide, however, which is the main thing.

And now for the games bit? Well, no, since that’s boring (I dug out my old N64, how fun!). I did see a pretty witty bit of defacement on a random street sign in Derby the other day though.

P.S. Revenge of the Sith should so very have been released today. May the fourth be with you…….

Derby graffiti artists are lazy bums, with the obvious exception of the guy who went and made himself an autobot stencil. I wonder if decepticon stencils will start cropping up too. That would be a nice touch.

On an unrelated note, what’s so special about blackberries and email? The 2-letter-per-key QWERTY layout on the newer models has me intrigued, not to mention the generous colour screens, but for email as far as I can tell they just connect to POP and IMAP over GPRS (yes, I realise they can connect to your hotmail too, but who uses hotmail any more?). Last I checked any series 60 phone can do that, not to mention all Sony Ericsson’s P-series handsets and some Motorola phone’s I’ve played with (the RAZR does it very well). The real problem is getting your mobile operator to play nice and let you use your GPRS for something other than WAP.

Speaking of which, GPRS pricing is a complete fucking con. I can’t be bothered to look at other mobile providers, but O2 charge £1 per Mb or £15 a month for 5Mb. It’s still cheaper than SMS (a text message can’t be more than 200bytes, and it costs 5p!) but a complete rip-off nonetheless. Maybe if £15 got you unlimited use…

Next time nature calls, let the answering machine get it!

And yes, that is Brad Pitt. He’s not cheap for modelling work, you know!

I found it in a post-your-desktop thread over at the Megatokyo forums and a guy who posted it there claims he found it on Minitokyo and that it may or may not be done by a German person. needless to say, searching the minitokyo site proved fruitless in the extreme, so I place an appeal here in the hope that some helpful netizen will come forward and email me with information.