I hate myself. I finally succumbed and bought a copy of The Order of The Phoenix. But only because it was on special offer at Woolworths. You can get it for £7.99 if you spend £15 on other stuff. This gave me the perfect excuse to buy Hail To The Thief and the DVD of Amelie.
Now I have four days to read it before Gill takes it off on holiday with her. This would be no problem if I wasn't frantically working to get Perl Template Toolkit finished by Monday.
My mobile phone company have just sent me a text message encouraging me to sign up for a service where they will send me more text messages that tell me how the British tennis player Tim Henman is doing at Wimbledon.
They obviously realise that the vast majority of the UK population are keen to have information about Henman's games as soon as possible. I find this very difficult to understand, but I freely admit that I'm in the minority here as I've never really understood the idea of patriotism - especially when applied to sporting competition.
It's rare that I'll watch sport. It's rarer that I'll decide to support one side or the other. It's far more likely that I'll just want to watch a good contest and won't care who wins or loses. It seems that most people don't do that. They want to cheer for one side or the other. And if it's an international competition they will often choose to support the competitor from their country.
This is where I get lost. Why should anyone feel any closer connection to a competitor (or a team) if they happen to live in the same country? Why is it nice (as I'm often told) to see Britain doing well? In what way does it improve my life if Tim Henman does well at Wimbledon. It doesn't, of course.
If I felt I wanted to support a particular player at Wimbledon, I'd make that choice on logical grounds - like how well they play or whether or not I like them as a person. From what I hear, Henman is past his best so he'd fail on the first test and he's far too sexist for me to like him as a person. He's said some very disparaging things about the women's game in the past.
So, no, I'm not particularly interested in hearing how my countrymen (and women) are doing. I'm far more interested in seeing a good match between evenly matched players.
Does that make me very strange?
Yay, blogging from the train! I'm such a geek.
6310i + Clie + Avantgo + Bluetooth = shiny goodness.
Going thru some old stuff today I came across this photo.
In case it's not entirely clear what's going on here, here's a blow-up of the central section.
Yes it's me. Taken in September 1982. All is not quite how it seems however. I wasn't in a heavy metal band. Maybe one day I'll take the time to tell the story behind the picture.
Summer Solstice and my thoughts turn to the Glastonbury Festival.
I'm not going this year. Actually I haven't gone for many years. The last time I went was in 1994. I was seriously considering going back this year, but tickets sold out before I got organised.
Why haven't I gone for such a long time? Well I had a pretty bad time the last couple of times that I went. In 1993 my tent was burgled. Twice. And I was sleeping in it both times. The next year I went back determined to prove to myself that I could still have a good time there despite my previous experiences. But it didn't quite work out like that. Although there was no specific incident that I can put my finger on, I really didn't enjoy it. I found I was too on edge the whole time.
I know that it's only a very small proportion of dickheads who try to spoil it for everyone else and the chances of getting burgled again (or smakced in the face, as happened to a friend) are very slim. But for me the atmosphere has been ruined. I can't relax and enjoy myself there any more.
Been a while since I went to see someone I really like live in concert. So I was very interested to see that David Bowie has announced a world tour that will take place this November. I've seen him four times (Serious Moonlight 1983, Plastic Spider 1987, Sound+Vision 1990, Outside 1995) and whilst he can be... er... variable... his last few albums have been very good so I'd like to go and see him again.
The tickets went on sale this morning. The London date he's playing is at Wembley Arena. Not one of my favourite venues. I was an hour late in remembering to look for tickets on the web so the first couple of sites I tried were sold out. I eventually found tickets still on sale at TicketMaster.
Then it started to turn nasty. The tickets were £36 or £46. Now I realise that it's a while since I bought tickets like this but that seemed excessive to me. I can remember seeing people at Wembley for £15. Nevertheless I gritted my teeth and decided to buy 4 tickets at £46 each.
That's when they started taking the piss. On top of the £184 for the tickets they wanted to charge a £17 booking fee and then a £2 "handling charge".
I decided that it was all too expensive. Mr Bowie will have to perform without me in the audience this time round.
I'm sure that one of the shows will be broadcast on VH1 anyway.
When I woke up this morning, I had the most brilliant idea for a TV show whizzing round my head. It's a Buffy spin-off. Called something like Slayer Juniors
Instead of a group of teenagers who go round fighting the evil undead, this will feature a group of pre-teens who go round fighting the evil unwell.
It's gonna be great.
Interesting article in the Guardian today about the Great British Seaside Resort. Well, interesting to those of us (like me) who grew up in such a place.
It seems that far from dying off quietly as everyone thought they doing, these towns have been enjoying a quiet resurgence over the last few years. In fact my old home town of Clacton in Essex has had a increase in population of 70% over the last thirty years.
I really didn't enjoy growing up in Clacton. I moved to London as soon as I could and have stayed here ever since. But I have to admit to a nagging nostalgia for the place and it's nice to hear it's doing well.
So this "Poi" thing that everyone seems to be talking about. What's that then?
Seems to me to be like juggling for people who can't juggle. Or am I missing something?
Busking has always been illegal on the tube. Until recently London Underground hav taken a very dim view of people playing music in their stations. It's only a few years since they ran a poster campaign that portrayed buskers as sinister criminals who should be avoided at all costs.
But all that has changed. They've decided that people like buskers and therefore buskers should be encouraged. There are details about this on their website. For a four month period they are allowing "registered" buskers at various stations on the network.
It's interesting to note that the venture has been sponsored by Carling. I can't help wondering how much money they have given and where the money went. There are performance areas marked out in the stations. These are semicircles of plastic covered in Carling logos and stuck to the floor. And there are posters all over the tube. The small print on these posters makes it clear that none of the money will go to the buskers themselves (they still make their money from donations from the public).
So it would be very easy to come to the conclusion that LU have only changed their mind on busking because they've worked out that they can make some money from it. But only a truely cynical mind would think that :)
Today the Daily Mail announces the result if its "national referendum" on holding a referendum about the new EU constitution.
Almost 90% of the votes were in favour of a referendum. Given that the vast majority of the votes would have come from Daily Mail readers this can hardly be surprising. More interesting is the fact that the Mail declared 100,000 votes (almost 6% of those cast) as void. These were largely from people who were suspected of voting more than once. It would be interesting to hear how many of these were "yes" votes.
Oh, and in a spectacular piece of unbiased reporting, the Evening Standard publishes an article about the referendum. Nowhere do they mention that it is almost identical to the Mail article that I linked to above. They don't even seem to think it's important to mention that the Mail and the Standard are owned by the same company.
This job has appeared on the UK job site JobServe like clockwork every two weeks for about the last two months. The description is always the same and it's always the same agent (Mani Suri at Aston Carter).
The job spec says "You will provide general development and testing using Perl, T-SQL and Unix Shell Scripting" and "Your main duties will be development of a feed system from supplied specifications, unit and integration testing of develop code and maintenance of feed documentation." This is pretty much a description of what I've spent most of the last eight years doing so I expect that I'd be a good bet for at least an interview for the role. If it existed.
So I've emailed the agent about five times about he job and have never had a response. I know I should follow-up with a phone call, but it's become a bit of a challenge to see if I can get any kind of a response just from emails. Even a response explaining why I'm not being considered for the role would be better than nothing.
I've become convinced that the job doesn't exist. I'm sure that it's just a honeypot that's used to attract CVs. I'm starting to wonder if Mani Suri is a real person or whether it's just an address that Aston Carter use to collect CVs.
My blog postings seem to get surprisingly high Google rankings, so I'm hoping that by mentioning Aston Carter and Mani Suri enough times in this entry then people searching for them in the future will find this entry and think twice before working with them.
Bitter? Me?
Massive embarassment on Saturday night.
We were at a party in Birmingham. About 11:30pm I wandered outside to where people were sitting round the remains of the barbeque. Someone had brought a guitar and people were playing and singing. Most of them were people who I didn't know. Someone I did know said "Oh, Dave can play, let him have a go."
So for the next forty minutes or so I attempted to bang out a few tunes that people would know. People were even kind enough to pretend that they recognised some of them.
Then a bit later on the owner of the guitar appears. And it turns out that he's good. Very good. I remember why I never play in public and vow to never do it again.
And, of course, one of the disadvantages of being teetotal is that I can't even claim I was drunk.
I was flicking randomly through some music channels this morning when I came across what I suppose is the video to Sinead Quinn's new single. In my opinion Quinn is one of a very small number (maybe two!) people to emerge from the recent plague of reality TV music shows with any kind of credibility. And this video only increases my respect for her.
The song is a pretty rocky number (sorry, but I can't remember the title) and Quinn is standing in front of a rock band dressed in a leather jump suit. So far, so average. But then I noticed the drum kit. You don't often see drum kits with the artist's name written on them any more, but this one definitely said "Sinead Quinn". And there was something familiar about the typeface used, but I couldn't remember why.
I remembered why on the way to work. I remembered 30 years ago when another young woman played on Top Of The Pops dressed in a leather jumpsuit. I'm sure that her name on the drumkit was written in exactly the same typeface.
Her initials were SQ too.
I didn't see enough of Quinn's video to make out what sort of guitar she was playing, but if it was a Rickenbacker Bass then the pastiche will be complete.
The Guardian sent a group of electoral observers to monitor how well the Daily Mail's "referendum" was being conducted.
[one of the observers] said: "I think the phrase 'totally flawed' comes to mind."
I asked him if he had ever pronounced an election "totally flawed" before.
"Only one," he said. "The 2001 Kyrgyzstan presidential elections."
Excuse me why my blood boils for a minute.
The Daily Mail is (as I've discussed before) the newspaper that panders to the "little englander" mentality in the UK. It's read by people who are intensely xenophobic. These people are extremely distressed by the possibility that the UK could at some point replace sterling with the Euro. The idea of having monetary notes without the Queen on them gives them nightmares.
So today the Daily Mail is running a "referendum". Actually it's just an opinion poll, but they've been talking it up. The question they are asking is "A new EU constitution is being negotiated and MPs will decide whether the UK accepts it. Do you think the final decision should be put to a referendum of the British people?" So it's a referendum on whether or not we want a referendum!
Of course the answer that the Mail wants (and the answer that it will almost certainly get, given its readership) is "Yes". But you only have to read what passes for "discussion" on the message board to see why this is a bad idea. The vast majority of the people posting there are incapable of having a logical discussion on the matter.
It's also interesting to note that the URLs for this stuff are all on the Femail web site. The Daily Mail doesn't actually put any of its content on the web as it assumes that its readers aren't computer literate enough to find it. The only exception is the bits that are aimed specifically at women. Make of that what you will.
We've been thinking about wills. Which leads to some very strange conversations.
"So what happens if there's a huge explosion at a wedding and we both die at the same time as all of our beneficiaries?"
"How likely is that?"
"It happened in Dynasty"
(OK, well it didn't go quite like that, but you get the point.)
Now I need to find out how much is costs to reserve a couple of plots in Highgate Cemetary.
[seems strange categorising this entry as "life"]
So this weekend was Matrix weekend. On Saturday I rewatched The Matrix and watched The Animatrix on DVD and yesterday I went to see The Matrix Reloaded.
Overrated. It's all horribly overrated.
Julian Cash is a very cool photographer who, for the past few years has set up a temporary studio at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention where he takes lots of photos that make everyone look really cool and interesting.
He's just put online a set of his photos from OSCON 2002. A number of Open Source luminaries are featured and somehow I even managed to get in two photos.
A generally disappointing day was turn around completely on getting to London Bridge station and finding that Vanilla Coke has finally made it to the UK.
Yes. I'm easily pleased.
Over a year ago I was with a group of friends in a pub (the best ideas always come from pubs) when we decided it that it would be a good idea to start to make a record of our memories of the late 1990s Dotcom Boom in London.
It's taken a while to get a round tuit, but I've finally set up a Wiki to gather this information. If you have anything to add, please go to londongeek.org and start writing.
It was going to be a quiet weekend. My parents came down to see us. They were sleeping in the spare room which is right next to ours.
At 5am we're all woken up by an almighty crash. A patch of ceiling in the spare room has decided that it is tired of being a ceiling and it wants to be a floor. Luckily it wasn't a section over the bed or we might not be able to laugh about it the way we are currently doing.
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