November 2003 Archives

David Blunkett writes in today's Guardian that he is not King Herod which, of course, clears up the confusion in many people's minds.

For those of you who don't know much christian mythology, Herod ruled parts of the Middle East as a puppet king under the Romans at about the start of the first century CE. Christians believe that he was so worried by predictions of the birth of a new king (i.e. Jesus) who might usurp his throne that he killed all children under the age of two. Jesus escaped this fate as he had received advance warning from an angel and his family were hiding in Egypt. All sounds pretty unlikely doesn't it.

I hadn't read of Blunkett being mistaken for Herod, but it was probably because of the new Immigration and Asylum Bill which proposes that the children of families who refused a free flight home after having their asylum application rejected could be taken into care.

Any excuse to link news with christmas :)

The Glastonbury festival has been given the go-ahead for 2004. The dates will be 25-27 June.

I should really think about going back soon. I haven't been since about 1995.

Someone thought that it would be a good idea to offer Benjamin Zephaniah an OBE. Unsurprisingly, he has turned it down. In today's Guardian he explains his reasons.

The UK needs more people like him.

It's summer 1999 and I'm working for QXL. They are in the middle of a major redesign of their web site. This involves changes to both the back end (replacing a home-grown file based system with Oracle and a commercial shop-building application) and the front end (a complete redesign).

We are doing the back end work, but the front end work is being done by an external agency called Syzergy. And they have, in turn, employed a market research group to run focus groups and other nonsense in order to work out what colours and logos the public really like.

One Friday afternoon the entire QXL tech team (about six people) are invited to Syzergy's office to see a presentation about the new site and how it was created. We leave our cramped office at the grottier end of Ladbroke Grove and make for their office in the West End.

The first thing I notice is the amount of empty space in their office. We barely have enough space to fit in all the desks we need but they have acres of spare space everywhere. In the meeting room where the presentation is, there are expensive sandwiches and bottled beers laid out for us. And then. in the middle of the table, there is a large glass bowl filled with M&Ms. When I say large, I would estimate that there were two or three hundred M&Ms in the bowl.

And every single one was either yellow or purple.

I think that yellow and purple were the colours in Syzergy's logo or something. But someone had bought dozens of packets of M&Ms and taken out just the yellow and purple ones to give to us. I never found out what happened to the rest of them.

That's the image that I always think of when people talk about the amount of money that was wasted during the dotcom boom in London.

The Times announced today that it is going to follow The Independent in experimenting with a tabloid version.

I'm guessing that The Guardian can't be far behind.

This is pretty cool. Don't tell them I told you about it :)

Are you watching season seven of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on BBC2? Is it making much sense to you? Do you find yourself thinking that the plot is a bit disjointed and confusing at times?

If so, please don't blame the writers or the production company. The blame lies firmly with the BBC. They BBC have always insisted that Buffy is a children's program which is suitable for broadcast at 6:45pm. Over the last couple of seasons this claim has looked less and less convincing. Buffy is an adult show that covers adult themes. In order to show it at 6:45pm the BBC has been editing the show to remove anything it thinks is unsuitable for broadcast at that time.

But of course, you can't just remove random parts of a tightly plotted TV show like Buffy without ruining the plot. I've been watching these showings, having previously watched the (far less cut) versions on Sky One. It's like watching a different program. If you're watching them on the BBC for the first time then I can only assure you that the plot does make sense and that you'd probably be better off waiting to watch the DVDs when they are released next year.

To give you an idea of the size of the problem, there are people in the Buffy newsgroup, uk.media.tv.buffy-v-slayer who are monitoring the cuts. Here is a summary of the amount that has been cut from the episodes shown so far[1].

Note that in two cases (Selfless and Never Leave Me) the BBC has removed almost three minutes of material. That's over 6% of the program.

And it's only going to get worse. The season has other episodes coming up which could have more removed than we've seen previously. The BBC has chosen an completely inappropriate time slot for this program and the viewers are suffering. If you'd like to complain to the BBC about how they are ruining the program then I suggest you email them at info@bbc.co.uk. If you want more details on the scenes that have been cut then read the archives from uk.media.tv.buffy-v-slayer.

[1] Many thanks to Jeremy Reeves at the BBC who supplies the timing information weekly.

[posting delayed by some days due to server outage]

I've invented a conspiracy theory. I reckon this telephone conversation took place some time on Friday.

"Hello?"
"Sophie, hello, it's Philip, listen the Family needs a favour. When's your baby due?"
"In about a month. Why?"
"Damn. Too far away. Ah well, that needn't matter. It can be early."
"Er... what?"
"Well, you know Charles has got himself in a bit of a fix with the media."
"Yes, but what does that have to do with me or my baby?"
"Babies trump sex scandals in tabloid headlines. You'll get him off the front pages."
"But it's not due yet."
"Not to worry, medical science is wonderful these days."
"You can't be serious."
"Ambulance is on the way now. It'll be with you in about ten minutes."

What do you think? It could have happened!

Tried hard, but couldn't resist the pun!

Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield has died.

Two days running without any progress on NaNoWriMo and I'm out with london.pm tonight so I won't get any done today either. Looks like there will be a lot of catching up to do over the weekend :(

Last night I found lots of things to do on this web site that were far more important(hah!) than writing. I realised that I'd added a few things that weren't listed on the main menu. I've now put that right so you'll now find new and interesting links to pages like this blog, the novel, the Nigerian spam counter and the stories from Wasted Inches.

Speaking of Wasted Inches, this morning I came close to wishing that I still ran that site. All of the tabloids dedicated the whole of their front page to covering the Soham murder trial. Well, all except one. The Daily Sport's main story was about the goings on at some media party. The Soham report was relegated to thin strip along the bottom of the page.

Voyager 1 has just left the Solar System. If Gene Roddenberry is to be believed, it'll be back in less than 300 years[1].

[1] Actually, on further thought, I don't think that was Voyager 1. Was it Voyager 6?

From the BBC

Assets worth millions of pounds and believed to be controlled by Dame Shirley Porter have been frozen under court orders secured by Westminster Council, it has been disclosed.

This is one of the best pieces of news I've heard for some time.

The BBC has gone all coy on us. In a current story about the former US marine Toby Studabaker they say that he is on trial for abducting a 12 year old girl that he met on the internet. They go on to say

Mr Studabaker, 32, allegedly disappeared with the youngster from Greater Manchester, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

It's "Shevaun Pennington". The girl's name in "Shevaun Pennington". I got that information from the BBC web site.

There's an article in today's Guardian which asks some interesting questions about copyright and historical documents. Simon Waldman (the Guardian's head of digital publishing) found an old 1938 edition of Homes and Gardens which contained an article about Hitler's home. The article tells how he published scans of the article on his web site and how this gave him all sorts of problems. At one point he was being supported in his battle by David Irving - which is enough to bother any sane person.

The original entries in Simon's blog are here.

A day and a half into NaNoWriMo and I'm already a few thousand words behind schedule. The weekends are supposed to be a chance to get ahead of schedule so that you can slack off a bit during the week.

Hey ho.

If you're interested, my feeble efforts are online.