May 2004 Archives

Gill's Dad has gone into hospital again and Gill has gone off to offer help and support. This is a bigger deal than it might sound as he lives in Barbados. So she got a flight out yesterday morning and will probably be there for about a month. This leaves Jordan and I to fend for ourselves. The timing could be better as J is right in the middle of her AS level exams. So I spent about an hour last night testing her on psychology. And we have crib sheets about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience stuck up all over the walls.

I've just noticed that tonight Channel 4 are repeating Solid Geometry. If you like Ian McEwan (and doesn't everyone like Ian McEwan?) then it's well worth watching. It's a brief (40 minutes) adaptation of the short story from First Love, Last Rites.

It's not an easy story to film (and if you've read it you'll know what I mean) and this production makes some significant changes in order to make it easier. But it's well worth watching. And even more worth reading. As are all of McEwan's books.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has won the 2004 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

This will hopefully make it more likely that the film will get a US distribution deal at some point before the election.

I liked Alex Petridis' take on Avril Lavigne in his review of her new album.

Nearly everyone under of 15 appears to have swallowed the official line on Lavigne: that she is an authentic symbol of punk rebellion, a scowling refusenik antidote to manufactured production-line pop. Everyone else is perplexed, largely because she could be no more obviously manufactured if she had a barcode and a telephone number for customer services taped to her forehead.

Like many people, I'll be off to watch Troy when it opens this weekend. For a while I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to re-read the Iliad so I'd know what I was talking about when I was comparing the film with the book, but I was surprised to find that we didn't have a copy in our immense collection of books (well we had a book that contained abridged copies of the Iliad and the Aeneid but that wasn't really what I wanted).

A quick trip to the local second hand bookshop put that right tho'. I returned with full copies of the Iliad and the Aeneid together with a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses (just because I like to buy books in threes).

So the plan is to read the Iliad followed by the Aeneid. The Aeneid tells how some of the Trojans escaped from the sacking of Troy (sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone) and ended up founding Rome. Or something like that. I'll probably follow that with Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain as that tells how some of the descendents of Aeneus (the Trojan who founded Rome) carried on their exploration and found an island north of the European mainland which way inhabited by giants. They killed the giants an took over the island which they named after their leader. Their leader's name was Brutus and they called the island Britain. So not only Rome, but also Britain claims a descent from Troy.

It's important to have roots. Even if they're completely fictional.

Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 911 was shown in Cannes yesterday. Sounds like it's going to be hot stuff well worth watching.

Here are reviews from the BBC and the Guardian.

I was going to link to an interesting story in the Guardian about how Stelios Haji-Ioannou is planning to get into the music download business with EasyMusic but the article requires registration, so I won't bother.

Notice that on that web page, Stelios talks about the licensing being based on copyleft.

Meet Jennifer Griffin. You'll probably be seeing a bit more of her as she's the daughter of BNP leader Nick Griffin and they will be using her in their party political broadcasts for the forthcoming elections.

Like many BNP members, she doesn't seem very bright. She was interviewed during filming for one of the TV slots.

'How do I know we have enough immigrants in this country?' she asked. 'I saw proof of it today: quite literally, me and the film crew were the only white faces on the street. They were all Asians or coloured people, and that tells me this country is full up.'

Jennifer is not certain where she was filming. 'Somewhere "Green",' she hesitates. 'Green Lanes?' She has an excuse to be confused: she has never been to London before. She admits she has no idea that Green Lanes is a key centre of London's Asian community. She adds that she had thought it was representative of the whole city, if not all of England.

As is often the case, some of today's best political commentary is to be found on the Guardian's letters page.

Piers Morgan has been sacked from the Mirror because he was fooled into printing the hoax photos of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners. But what about all the editors who were hoaxed into printing stories about weapons of mass destruction and the other excuses for going to war that have been shown to be complete fabrications? Don't see any of them being sacked?

I just got an email from The Motley Fool that started like this:

To prevent this and other Motley Fool email newsletters from getting swept up by an overzealous spam filter, please add our "From" address (removed@xxx.xx.xx) to your address book.

This blog has always run on Movable Type. It's a great piece of software which makes building and running a site like this very easy. I run a couple of other sites on this server which are completely powered by MT.

I've always had one small problem with MT tho'. And that's the license. MT isn't "free software" in the same way as all of the other software I use to run this site. Oh, it certainly costs nothing. but it's not free in as much as I can't do whatever I want with the software. I can't, for example, install a copy on a client's site and then charge them for doing it. And I can't use it commercially without paying for a license.

Now that's all fine. I have no problem with people licensing their software in any way that they want. As it happens I've always been using MT in a way that allows me to use it for free. In fact I like the program so much that a couple of years ago I made a voluntary donation to the people that wrote it.

Yesterday a new version of MT (version 3.0) was released. And it seems that the biggest change is in the way that it is licensed. They are effectively clamping down on the hundreds of people who were using free copies of MT in ways that broke the old license. Now to use MT for free you need to have only one author and a maximum of three weblogs. Otherwise you'll need to buy a license. These start at $70 for personal use or $300 for commercial use.

Once again I need to emphasise that I have no problem at all wtih people licensing their software under any terms that they want, but these changes have made me think twice about how I'm using MT on my server. I have (I think) three separate installations of MT each of which is running one blog. One of them has two authors, and that one is also perilously close to being a commercial use (it's an online CV for an actress friend). So I need to think carefully about whether I need to buy a license and exactly which license to buy. I'm pretty sure that both this site and Cool Stuff would currently be acceptable under the free license, but I'd certainly like to add other authors to Cool Stuff at which point I'd need at least a $70 license for it. And I would probably need to buy a $300 license for Jules' site.

What I'm really saying, I suppose, is that I can't be bothered to think about these issues. I'm used to using software that is free to use in any way that I want. I'm not used to thinking about licenses. If I'm going to have to think about this stuff then I'd rather just move to using a different program.

So it looks like I'll be moving away from using MT in the near future. I've heard good things about WordPress so I'll take a look at that, but currently I'm very tempted by a lightweight solution like Bryar. But there might be something better out there. I'll be looking around over the next couple of weeks.

Mena Trott of Six Apart has written a piece explaining why they have introduced the license changes. The trackbacks (and all kudos to her for enabling trackbacks on a contentious article like that) would seem to imply that she hasn't done a good job.

It seems that the Silver Ring Thing has its eyes on the UK. George Monbiot discusses the problems with their approach

Abstinence campaigns such as the Silver Ring Thing do delay sexual activity, but when their victims are sucked into the cesspool (nearly all eventually are), they are, according to a study at Columbia University, around one-third less likely to use contraceptives, as they are not "prepared for an experience that they have promised to forgo". The result, a paper published in the British Medical Journal shows, is that abstinence programmes are "associated with an increase in the number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants". You read that right: abstinence training increases the rate of teenage pregnancy.

Joy of sex education

I've never seen the point of patriotism. As far as I can see nothing good ever came out of people being patriotic. And one of the most stupid manifestations of patriotism is when people start to treat their countries flag as an object of reverence. I've always found it really funny when people in the USA get upset about people "desecrating the flag". Whenever I hear about people being imprisoned for mistreating the US flag I'm always grateful that I live in a country that has a bit more perspective on these things.

But that might not be true for much longer. According to front page of today's Sunday Express a group of MPs want to pass a law that would make desecrating the flag a crime in the UK.

It's laughable.

Update: I should make it clear that of course I don't think that everyone from the USA is like that. But there are enough of them to make it all a bit worrying.

It seems that Disney has blocked the distribution of Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11 by its subsidiary Miramax.

Apparently it will annoy the Florida Governor Jeb Bush and therefore might endanger millions of dollars of tax breaks that the Mouse Factory gets from the state government.

Things that make you like a new employer, number one.

Arriving at your desk on the first day to be shown a computer and told to install whatever operating system you feel happy with.

I have a number of email addresses. And unfortunately many of them are on spammers' lists. This means that it's common for me to three or four copies of any spam that is going around.

This morning, I checked my spam folder for the first time for a week. There was far more new spam there than I'm used to seeing. Further investigation revealed one email that I'd been sent 750 times and another that I'd been sent 350 times.

I'm really glad that I got the Bayesian filters working last week, as that was the only thing that prevented them from appearing in my inbox.

When I first saw The Da Vinci Code in bookshops I was very interested as I love all that conspiracy theory stuff about the Templars, the Holy Grail and the early christian church. It's over twenty years since I first read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and I still like to read a couple of books like that every year.

But then I realised that The Da Vinci Code was a novel, so I put it back and didn't buy it. Over the next couple of months I came close to buying it a number of times, but each time I couldn't help thinking that it would be one of those crap American thrillers that I hate so I didn't buy it.

Then last week I was in a bookshop and I wanted a third book to go in a "3 for 2" offer, so I finally cracked and bought it. I'd also read Simon Waldeman's piece about it so I thought it was worth giving it a go.

And, you know, I'm really not sure what I thought of it. It's certainly not great literature. Dan Brown isn't a very good writer. But I don't know if that's very important. What is important is that through this book a lot more people will be introduced to the theories. And that annoys the church. And anything that annoys the cuhurch has to be a good thing.

As I said before, these theories aren't new at all, but I suspect that a relatively small proportion of the population are aware of them. In case you're interested and haven't read the book yet, here's a brief summary (without spoiling the plot).

* Jesus was married to Mary of Magdelene
* They had children
* The church has tried to cover up these facts
* The Knights Templar discovered something in the ruins of the temple in Jerusalem that proved these facts
* When the Templars were disbanded, they actually went underground and changed their name to the Priory of Sion
* The Priory of Sion is still going today
* They know where the Templars secret is hidden
* They also know the identities of the descendents of Jesus and Mary

I don't know (or particularly care) if these facts are true or not. But what is true is that various branches of the church seem to get very upset if people start discussing these theories.

I've just seen that there is a film of the book planned too. So even more people will be talking about it. And the church will get even more upset.

Bugger. I completely forgot that tickets for the New York Dolls gig at the Royal Festival Hall went on sale yesterday. And now there are only a small number of really crap seats left :(

Amd while we're talking about dodgy old bands, my stepdaughter went to see Hawkwind last night. She's about the same age as when I first saw them on the Hawklords tour back in the late 70s. Weird to think that I haven't seen them for over twenty years.

Won't see her until tomorrow so I don't know how much she enjoyed it. But just thinking about it makes me regret the fact that all of my Hawkwind albums are on vinyl and I don't currently have a working turntable. I forsee some CD shopping in my immediate future :)

Hal-an-Tow, jolly rumbelow
We were up long before the day-o
To welcome in the summertime
To welcome in the May-o
For summer is coming in
And winter's gone away

Happy Mayday everyone.