May 2003 Archives

Writing is fun, but finishing writing is better.

Just sent off the first draft of my[1] new book to O'Reilly. That makes me feel good.

[1] OK, not strictly my book. I'm one of three co-authors.

I just got some spam advertising "Male Penile Enlargement".

I'm struggling to come up with any other kind.

I'm in the centre of Tunbridge Wells today and pass two elderly women sitting on a bench, sharing a bag of crisps. One woman starts reading the packet.

"Oh look," she says, "they were made in Denmark."

"Never mind," says the other, "at least it's not Morocco or somewhere like that."

You couldn't make it up.

I saw X2 on Saturday. I'll put a review up when I get some spare time, but a quick question for any fans of the X-Men comic that might be reading this.

In that final shot, when the camera is panning over the lake, did you half expect Jean Grey to come flying out out of the water proclaiming "I AM THE PHOENIX!".

Or was that just me?

Just before I left work yesterday, I heard that the Northern Line was suspended between Stockwell and Morden so I wouldn't be able to use it to get home. My other option is to get a train from Victoria so I decide to walk down to Temple station and get the tube from there to Victoria.

The quickest way to get there from where I work is to take a walk thru the Inner and Middle Temples. This area is now part of the London Inns of Court where most of London's barristers have their chambers, but the history of the area goes way back - it was the location of the headquarters of the Knights Templars in the 12th century. They build the Temple Church on the site in 1185 and it still stands there to this day. The old part is build on the circular design that is unique to churches build by the Templars (there's another one I know of in Cambridge).

So the whole area is steeped in history and the story of the Templars is a particularly interesting part of history (there are some very interesting theories about the Templars and the Masons). All in all it reminded me of that it's an interesting area of London that I don't know enough about. I think I should probably read up on it and organise a Crisps walk around the area.

I've always loved London. I used to love coming up to London when I was a child. One of the things that I loved most was going to Downing St. In those days (the 1970s) anyone could wander up to the front door of Number 10 and have their picture taken with the nice policemen standing at the front door.

Then during the 80s that changed. Thatcher was an such an unpopular Prime Minister that there were serious worries about her safety. So at huge public expense[1], a set of security gates were built at the end of Downing St and you can now only get into the street if you have business there. It's a shame as a whole generation of children have been denied that photo-opportunity.

This morning I see that it's gone a stage further. The Government are so worried about terrorist attack that they are putting up concrete blocks around the Houses of Parliament. This is apparently "to stop a suicide truck bomb slamming into the Houses of Parliament".

London is slowly turning into a fortified city.

[1] I remember thinking at the time that it would surely be far cheaper to just get a less unpopular Prime Minister. But that idea took a few more years to become popular!

The new series of Big Brother starts in the UK tonight. I'm happy to admit that I find it all fascinating and will therefore be glued to my TV for large portions of the next ten weeks.

The nasty British tabloid rag The Sun likes to think of itself as the "official Big Brother paper" and will be covering the programme in great detail. Their journalists must love this time of year as they get get to watch TV all day and write about what they are seeing.

You can tell the level of The Sun's coverage however from the fact that earlier this week they offered £50,000 to the first couple to have sex in the Big Brother house. This wuldn't be worth mentioning if it wasnt' for the fact that only heterosexual sex will be considered. Or as the paper puts it "the first boy-girl bonk". The Guardian had a nice piece about this in yesterday's diary.

Homophobia is alive and well in the UK and The Sun is its spiritual home.

Yesterday was my weekly trip to dispense bite-size chunks of my Perl knowledge to selected denizens of Tunbridge Wells.

On the way back I was sitting on the train reading Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. It's set in a distant future where most towns and cities have turned themselves into "traction cites" which move around the country attacking at destroying other towns. At one point the main characters are picked up by an extremely run-down and unpleasant town called "Tunbridge Wheels" which made me smile when I read it as it was the kind of thing that would really anger any inhabitants of the real Tunbridge Wells.

I was even happier a couple of chapters later when the town was destroyed.

Go almost anywhere in the world and you'll find a British Ex-Pat community. A group of people who at some point in their lives decided that living in the UK wasn't for them and they'd like to start a new life in a new country with an exciting new culture.

Except that it rarely works out like that. It's far more common that they take a little bubble of British culture with them and completely ignore any local culture that they find in their new home. The interesting thing is that this bubble of British culture is a snapshot of the UK as it was when they left. They seem to become completely isolated from any changes in the culture back in the UK. And of course the UK now bears very little resemblance the UK of even thirty years ago. We've moved on. Things have changed. I've visited ex-pat communities in many countries and it always seems like I'm stepping back in time by a good fifty or sixty years.

And then there's the Daily Mail. The newspaper for ex-pats who haven't even bothered to leave the county. It seems to be read by people who have created a little "ex-pat bubble" around themselves and try to ignore the changes in the UK over the last few decades. It's probably the British newspaper that I despise the most.

Today the Mail launches a campaign to save Britain. It's based around their knee-jerk reaction to the possibility that the UK might one day join the Euro but they are making it a wider isue than that. They are complaining about everything that is chipping away at the Britain (they'd probably say "England") that they want to live in. The Britain of village greens, bobbies on bicycles and a compliant underclass who know their place and doff their flat caps as their betters drive past in a Bentley.

Of course this Britain doesn't exist any more. It's been gone for decades. But the Daily Mail readers either don't know this or won't accept that it's true. They have turned their dormitory towns in the home counties into ex-pat communities no less out of touch than the ones Africa or the Caribbean.

They're in for a rude awakening. And the sooner it comes, the better.

Hooray for sugar-free Red Bull. Now I can stay awake without getting fatter!

It seems that the "Saving Private Lynch" story that we got from the US (and, of course, UK) media wasn't as accurate as it could have been.

The BBC programme Correspondent has being doing some research into the truth of the story and their results will be shown on Sunday night.

"We gave her three bottles of blood, two of them from the medical staff because there was no blood at this time,"said Dr Harith al-Houssona, who looked after her throughout her ordeal. "I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle. Then I did another examination. There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only RTA, road traffic accident," he recalled. "They want to distort the picture. I don't know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury."

Oh, now I feel really embarassed.

A few weeks ago I put some old AD&D books up for sale on Ebay. I didn't get much money for them but at least they sold. One person won two of them. I sent him the payment instructions soon after the auction finished and got no response. Over the weekend I sent him another email asking what was going on.

Having still had no response, this morning I posted negative feedback about the buyer on both of these auctions.

Then half an hour later I get a reply to my last email apologising for the delay and telling me that his father had just died so that he'd been very tied up making all the arrangements.

I feel like such a bastard.

I, of course, have no objections to giving money to charity. One of the saddest days I spent last spring when I was unemployed was to go thru my bank account cancelling all of the money direct debits that were going to various charities. Now I'm starting to to get back on my feet financially speaking I need to think about setting those up again.

I'll probably give some careful thought to exactly which groups I choose to help. Previously it was international groups like Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Action Aid together with organisations that have helped me or my family like Battersea Dogs Home and the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths. I'm sure that it'll be a similar set of charities that I'll be supporting this time round, but if anyone has any ideas of other groups who could use my support then I'd be interested in hearing them.

But the important point is that I make rational decisions about the charities that I support. And having decided which charities to support and how much money to give them, I don't give any more. I never give money to people shaking tins on the street[1] and I actually find it really offensive when people come round collecting for charities when I'm sitting with a group of friends in the pub as it attempts to use peer pressure to get you to give money. I often come off looking like the bad guy, but I don't mind that as I'm sure in my mind that I'm doing the right thing.

But the thing that has triggered this journal entry is something new that I've noticed on the streets of London recently. This recession is obviously hitting the charities badly. They have teams of people on the streets who stop people and ask them to set up for monthly direct debits to benefit the charity. They obviously have it all planned out as they take it in turns. It's a different one every day but there is always one charity out in force on Holborn as I walk from the tube station to the office. They are always very polite, but it's just annoying to have to politely turn them down every day.

This has got to be a sign of desparation on the part of the charities. This must be an expensive operation and the conversion rate must be extremely low. So if you're thinking of supporting a charity then please do it today and help to keep these "charity ninjas" off our streets.

[1] But I do buy the occasional copy of the Big Issue.

My phone contract expires later this week which means it's time for a phone upgrade. I'm pretty sure that I'm going for the Nokia 6310i. This means that I get Bluetooth enabled for the first time.

Of course having one Bluetooth device is no fun at all so I'm probably going to buy the Bluetooth memory stick for my Sony Clie. I found it at Dabs for £57, but I thought that I'd check the local Dixons on the offchance that they might have it in stock.

And much to my surprise, they did. It was £169.

So it really is important to shop around boys and girls.

Buffy season six is released on DVD on Monday, but Play.com delivered my pre-ordered copy yesterday.

This leaves me with a huge dilemma. I should be working on the book, but it seems that I am pathologically incapable of doing any kind of work when there are unwatched Buffy DVDs in the house.

I thought that everyone understood the principles behind the idea that given time and typewriters, an infinite number of monkeys would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Of course you either need an infinite number of monkeys or an infinite amount of time. But it's obvious, I hope, that given one of those two conditions Shakespeare will be written. It's a thought experiment. Impossible to do in the real world.

But it seems this logic is lost on some people. A group in Paignton Zoo decided to test the hypothesis. So they set up six monkeys with typewriters for a month. They got a grant from the Arts Council to do it.

And, of course, they didn't even get a complete word. The Zoo's scientific officer Dr Amy Plowman said that the experiment shows that "the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed." Did you notice the word "scientific" in her job title? Not sure how that got there as she seems to be incapable of logical thought.

Now excuse me, I'm just off to spend the weekend staying in Hilbert's Hotel.

I have a page on this site where I talk about some of the worst cries against the English language that are regularly committed by the staff of London Underground. I'm thinking of updating that page more frequently as I've recently heard so many new grammatical monstrosities on my journeys to and from work. For example, at 8:30 this morning we were stuck in a tunnel just outside Clapham Common when the driver made the following announcement.

Due to signalling problems in the Stockwell area. That is the reason for this delay.

Oh, and when I'm on a language rant I must draw your attention to the BBC programme The Murder Game where the contestants include a number of people with a wonderfully cavalier attitude to the language. Last Saturday one contestant repeatedly told a suspect that she wasn't "at liability" to reveal certain information too him.

Yesterday's entry was (of course) inspired by a day spent in one of the towns described. I was therefore very happy when various meetings overran and other meetings were cancelled which enabled me to get on an earlier train back to civilisation.

My happiness was short-lived, however, when two stops down the line my carriage was overrun by schoolgirls. Is there anything scarier than a pack (there must be a better collective noun) of 13 and 14 year old schoolgirls?

At one point one of them (the one who seemed to be the ringleader) started offering sweets around. She even offered them to me and I politely declined. But I couldn't help thinking that something was seriously wrong with the world. Shouldn't it be me offering sweeties to schoolgirls instead of the other way round?

Did I mention how much I hate most British towns. Especially the ones in the London commuter belt. Nasty, nasty places full of stupid people with closed minds. And town centres that are full of exactly the same shops as every other town, And there's always a couple of shops with "clever" names like "Piece of Cake" or "Hair Apparent".

Hate them. Hate them all.

Are we clear now?

In a weblog entry at Ecademy, Hilary Curtis makes a point that was probably obvious to most people, but which had passed me by completely.

She points out that trackbacks are a first step to a fully connected web where visitors to a web site can not only add links to a page, but also from a page. This is an incredibly powerful concept. I need to spend some time thinking about it.

So rafael wrote a journal entry about atheism and in a reply I called religion "obvious nonsense" and wondered why intelligent people would have anything to do with it[1]. Then Simon decided that he'd write an article answering my question.

It's an interesting article. Personally I don't find the arguments convincing - but it's about Simon's fatih not mine, so that's OK. I should really spend time writing a detailed response. And I will. But not until I get the first draft of the Template Toolkit book of to O'Reilly.

Oh, there's one error I can point out in Simon's article immediately. He says that I'm not really interested in the answer to my question. I hope to persuade him that I am.

[1] Note, this is a move from my previous posiition which was that by believing in a religion a person went some way to proving that they weren't intelligent.

I'm really enjoying slowing working thru all of my CDs and ripping them to .ogg files. I'm finding a lot of things that I'd forgotten about. On Saturday I listened to all my old Talking Heads CDs and today it's the turn of Pink Floyd.

$ find /data/audio/ -name "*.m3u" | wc -l
    275

It seems that I've got cleverer in the last year. I scored 139 in the BBC's national IQ test and last year I only got 137.

Of course it's still all bollocks tho'.

My current clients have announced that they are "demerging" the UK part of their business and are making plans to sell off various bits and pieces. I think that this means something along the lines of "sink or swim on your own, you unprofitable pommie bastards".

One of the bits that is for sale is the part I'm working for - Ample. Ample is the financial information web site that was formerly known as III. This was supposed to be one of the success stories of the UK dotcom boom, but it never really worked out like that. I think that III must hold the record for the highest number of London Perl Mongers that have worked there at one time or another.

This is the first time I've been working in central London on May 1st. The owners of the building I work in are obviously expecting the worst as they've closed and chained the main gates and I was only able to get in through a side door after a close examination of my pass.

If anyone is on the demonstration and goes past Holborn Bars (the old Prudential building) then please wave at me. I'm down in the basement.