New Year's

I hope everyone had a fab New Year's - better than mine, at least! Because of this damn flu that I've had since before Christmas coupled with the exhaustion I really didn't feel well enough to go to the party I'd planned on, and so I stayed at home and fell asleep before midnight (only to be woken up just after midnight by all the fireworks exploding outside my window). And that's one of the first times I can remember not even staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve.

Sick of spam? Spamwars is a game where you earn points for destroying spam and cartoon spammers. Fun! And I've managed to get hooked on this game from Orisinal. Have fun :) [Both require Flash]. And try the Litmus test from the BBC - I got a score of 198, which seems to be higher than anyone got yesterday (although not really surprising considering most people's mental states yesterday!)

Private Eye reveals headlines - King Herod's Massacre of the Innocents 'a system failure'... and on a different note, the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) has attempted a reverse domain name hijack of dvla.com, the website of DVL Automation. Which reminds me - my driving test has been booked for February 4th. Keep your fingers crossed...

MP3 worm

Windows XP and Winamp users should beware the latest MP3 worms.

"Two new security vulnerabilities, disclosed late Wednesday, allow an attacker to completely take over a computer system by using malicious music files.
The first vulnerability is present in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. This vulnerability can be exploited when a user simply lets the cursor hover over the file icon for the malicious MP3, or opens a folder where the file is stored.
The second is found in Nullsoft's Winamp, a popular Windows media jukebox player."

There's a patch available for XP users, and Nullsoft has released fixed versions of Winamp to download.

Generations of blogging

I came across a thoughtful article of Shelley's on the development of blogging:

And weblogging is maturing in ways other than just technologically. Consider the the first generation of the weblogging, based on discovering what weblogs are and how they work. This is analogous to a child learning what its legs are and how they can be used. Following the early exploration stage, there was the second weblogging generation, much of it based on links and popularity. This is so reminiscent of our teen years, and our desire to fit in, to be popular, that the analogy to human behavior is nothing less than astonishing.
I'm hoping that we're heading into a third generation of weblogging, young adulthood if you will.

Interesting - however, I'm still very much a first-generation weblog. Not surprising really, seeing as I've been blogging for a whole 25 days. Oh well, I have plently of time to catch up :)

This morning I received a long-awaited letter from Royal Holloway (the only one of my six university choices that I hadn't yet heard from). It turns out they've taken a whole month to issue me a letter confirming that I will receive an offer from them, which I was told in the interview. Slight anti-climax, then! Hopefully I'll get the UCAS offer in the next week or so.

In other news, I'm trying to get my site up and on its feet properly - at the moment I have a front page where fully half of the internal links don't work (as I have yet to write content for them) and the whole site's a bit...bare. Hopefully when all the content's in I'll do a redesign so that it looks better. Not in the next couple of weeks though, because I now have to try to finish all my holiday work before we go back to school on Thursday.

Last-minute panic

Days and days since I posted... I have an excuse though - I've had barely any free internet time since before the weekend because of having to rush through all my holiday homework, which I hadn't yet started.

I didn't say it was a good excuse!

Note also my use of the phrase 'free internet time' - this does not translate as 'free time to go on the internet', but rather: 'free time on the internet after I've done everything I normally do - check email, the Discworld message boards I frequent, alt.fan.pratchett, all the blogs I read...'. This results in me spending quite a lot of time not doing homework, particularly in the case of my physics coursework which I word-processed - I spent an astounding amount of time yesterday discovering new weblogs, fiddling around on the internet, not doing much. And if I'd started doing something substantial on the net, such as (to take a purely random example) writing another blog update, I'd have felt guilty for not doing physics. Strange how flexible my conscience seems to be :)

However, I've succumbed now, I still haven't finished my physics, and I really should have allowed at least three days to complete it, rather than just two. I must sort out my time organisation skills, they seem to be somewhat lacking in...existence.

Anyway, now onto the main news of the day, which is the same as the main news of the day for most people in the south-east of England - snow![1]. Yesterday when I woke up there was a light dusting of snow over the ground, today it snowed all day, non-stop - we're up to about 1-2 inches of snow at the moment. Everything looks really beautiful - from inside the house, obviously :). I would take a picture with my dad's digital camera and post it up here, but he's in Houston at the moment and he took it with him. Grr.

Updates - my comments system is now working, apparently, on all computers but mine. Everyone else can see the 'Comment on this' link, but I can't, on Opera or using IE6. Hopefully I'll be able to see the link from school tomorrow. I can't think what it is on my system that's vanishing the link for me - I definitely have JavaScript enabled, so it's not that.

Christmas is... well, I was going to say that Christmas is now well and truly over, but now with all the snow everywhere it really doesn't feel like it. It gives me an excuse to keep playing Christmas songs, anyway! Just the one, actually - Coldplay's cover of Merry Little Christmas[2] which I only discovered about ten days or so ago (thanks Jeremy!). And now there's about 325 days until I can play it again. :(

That's all for now - there may be more later when I'm trying to avoid my physics again.

Snow in moonlight

Still working on physics - but I went downstairs just now and went outside (in my slippers) for a look at the snow. Everything looks quite ethereal and unreal, not least because I don't think we've had any snow for at least the last two years.

And growing at the front of the house I found a red rose, covered in snow. And now I really wish I had that digital camera handy!

I now have a links page that works, which means that more than half of the links on my front page actually lead somewhere now! And just a note, which coincides with Burningbird's article on abolishing blogrolls. The links on my page represent websites that I regularly visit, daily in many cases. Each and every link is a personal recommendation from me to you, dear reader.

Just thought I'd clarify that. Speaking of which...

Radio 4 are broadcasting play adaptations of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, which I recommend with a passion. Don't be put off by the fact that the books are stacked in the 8-12yr section of WHSmith, they're superb. I haven't actually listened to the radio plays yet, but I assume they're very good as well. They're being broadcast on three consecutive Saturdays, starting 4th January 2003, so I've missed the first one. You can still listen to it live on the website though, but only if you have the evil RealPlayer. Looks like I'm going to have to install it...

In amongst all the internet surfing I was doing today I found William Gibson's newly-established blog - yes, that William Gibson. I was just scanning through it and on his front page is a little snippet of a review for his (yet to be released) latest book, Pattern Recognition. The review was by Neil Gaiman, which struck me as a little bizarre purely because: (1) I'd never heard of William Gibson before today, (2) I'd never read any of Neil Gaiman's novels before yesterday, when I started reading American Gods, (3) it's only in the last month that I discovered Neil Gaiman's journal, which I now read regularly, and (4) I found William Gibson's site completely randomly, and only worked out that he was an author judging by the information on his weblog. Then a couple of hours later I picked up American Gods and noticed on the front cover a little snippet of a review by William Gibson...

I like these little coincidences :). And as a result of this, Neuromancer is now on my Amazon wishlist. Oh, go on. Buy me something. Like the iPod, or the £350 Macromedia Dreamweaver?

Which blogs do you listen to?

So, physics done, got to bed 2am, had a stunning four hours' sleep, thank you very much. The annoying thing is that I'm not that tired at the moment, which means I'm really going to pay for it tomorrow. I'm actually in an unnaturally good mood today, what with the weather and all the snow making my ickle toes cold, and getting up at 6.30, and sunrise/sunset being 8.03am and 4.11pm respectively, meaning that I really am going to school and coming home in the dark.

Part of my good mood could be due to the fact that I received a late Christmas pressie this morning, which contained Ursula le Guin's Earthsea Quartet, which I've been meaning to read for about five years. So thanks to Missiedith for that :)

Blog-related now - several people, including Aquarion have been exploring audio blogging, which seems to be the latest thing. I've heard of quite a number of difficulties with using audioblogs - obviously the biggest being the lack of links, download time of the audio file, listening time (which is longer than reading time), quality of sound file (being able to understand the voice of the blogger, which is probably significantly more difficult than reading text if English is not your first language), lack of being able to quote the blog entry, lack of searchability, lack of editing facility - but not many reasons to implement it. Other than 'it's cool'.

And it is.

I think that audioing things could work, if not for blogs (too much web storage space needed for doing daily updates and keeping archives), then at least for 'writings' sections of sites - storytime! Or, to try to combine audio blogs with links, work it like the 'Scratch 'n' sniff' things they did for Children In Need five or so years ago - a read-along experience :)

Not so evil

I've installed the latest RealPlayer software (now called RealOne Player) and I'm pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn't appear to be nearly as evil as it used to be, although I still had to go through the twenty or so Preferences screens: 'No, do not check for updates...or for new messages...don't play CDs or DVDs on insertion...don't send data to RealServers...' And RealPlayer 8 was even worse!

The speed of gravity has been measured - gravity has been shown to travel at the speed of light. I know what you're thinking[1] - 'the speed of gravity?' The standard explanation is the same as that of the speed of light; ie. that if the Sun instantly vanished, we wouldn't notice for over eight minutes because there would still be light travelling towards us. Since the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light, the Earth would continue travelling in its orbit for over eight minutes after the Sun went kaplooie and would then fly off in a straight line once it finally stopped feeling the effect of the Sun's gravity.

Another reason not to arm policemen:

COOKEVILLE, Tennessee (CNN) -- Police video released Wednesday showed a North Carolina family kneeling and handcuffed, who shrieked as officers killed their dog -- which appeared to be playfully wagging its tail -- with a shotgun during a traffic stop.

CNN story, via Tom Tomorrow.

And Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has just released his first novel - and has it freely available to download in lotsa different formats (although I think he'd really like you to buy it as well). Why?

Classifieds

Right, well my interview with HTA Architects has been arranged (for a gap year job), but unfortunately it's been arranged for Thursday, which is when I have to do my practical experiment for my physics coursework, so I've had to email YinI and ask them to reschedule. Hopefully the company won't be too annoyed with me, because it looks like the sort of work I'd like to do. We shall see...

Have a look at this website - it's a spoof local newspaper, and brought me to tears of laughter. Here are some of the adverts in the Classified section:

SMALL SPACE to rent behind Venetian Blind. Would suit ornament or tiny person. £128pcm. Tel 01999 940 1100

---

LOST IN NEWSPAPER office for twelve weeks. Please help me. 01999 950 044

---

JACK RUSSELL terrier puppy. In thick, sweet sauce. Cooking accident. £offers. Box FE8330

---

ASSORTED baby clothes and toys. No longer required. Also cot, baby carrier, 8 rolls of teletubby wallpaper, frozen breast milk. Quick sale. Also noisy baby. Offers. 01999 940445 Geoff/Julie.

---

CHAIR and four matching dining tables. Mail order catalogue error. £190 Tel 01999 963 222

Classic...

Laugh away

Having discovered how to ftp files to my server via the MS-DOS prompt, behold, my fun stuff section is now open!

Enjoy :)

Gone

Have a look at the coolest digital clock ever. Via brainsluice.

So, my job interview[1] has been rescheduled for Monday. Having looked carefully through the job description I can see that the job entails just the sort of work I want, except that it requires working 'outside normal hours', which I'm a bit worried about and don't really want to do. That's something I'll be asking them to clarify on Monday.

And I'm not sure when you'll actually be able to read this, because my website has vanished at the moment and I can't even ping it - not sure why, but hopefully that'll be sorted soon.

Disappearing act over

Ah, it's reappeared again. Jolly good.

Interviews and more books

So, my job interview came and went. I think it went really well, not like a formal interview at all, just a nice relaxing chat. There are a lot of pros about this job - in that it's just the type of work I'm looking for, and it comes with a nice salary, etc. - but some major disadvantages as well. Such as:

1. They'd like me to work there for 12-14 months, starting this July and then working right up into September, so that there's an overlap between me and the YinI student starting next year. Not good as it means I'll barely have any time to relax after my A-levels are finished, and I won't be able to do any travelling just before I go to university, which is something that I'm possibly interested in doing. Also, I'd be working right through two consecutive Augusts, which just seems abhorrent to me at the moment, since August is most definitely classed in my mind as Holiday Time.
2. At the moment the journey is a 40-minute train ride to Waterloo, then nine stops up on the tube, and then a five-minute walk. Miraculously, yesterday the train/tube part took only just over an hour since both were on time and I barely had to stop walking in between. However, I suspect this is a rare occurrence. This means that I'd have to catch the 7.45am train, which means that (considering how long it takes to drag myself out of bed) I'd have to get up just gone six ay-emm. Very bad.
3. The longish journey enters into Zone 2 on the London transport system, which means that my daily ticket would cost a whopping £12.70, or about £50-£55 per week if I bought a season ticket. This is about one third of my salary (after tax). Plus, the office is going to relocate mid-2004 (when I'd be there) and they don't yet know where to, so conceivably I could have to travel much further and spend a lot more money just to get in to work. Here's a huge tube map if anyone wants to have a look [670k].
4. The company doesn't offer sponsorship through university for this position because they're an architectural firm and don't have any suitable work for an IT graduate. This is another thing that is Not Good, because I was kinda banking on that.
5. Since they use lots of graphics, they have about 75% Mac computers and 25% PCs. This is a 'bad point' simply because I'm being picky (well, only slightly) - I've never used a Mac computer. Well, not since the seldom-used computer in our classroom in Year 5 of the junior school was a Mac, but I barely used it and I can remember it baffling me because I hadn't used them before. However, there is a 2-3 day training course that I would be sent on right at the beginning of the working period, so this might not be a huge problem.

And, as I think I've mentioned, I also applied to IBM's pre-university employment scheme way back in October, which I really would like to do. However, the closing date for applications is stated on their website as the end of February, so presumably they haven't even started processing the application forms yet seeing as I haven't heard one peep out of them. So if yesterday's interview results in a job offer I'll have to either accept it and then pull out of the IBM scheme, or decline it, cross my fingers and hope I get a result with IBM.

My interview was over by 11.30am, so I went to Oxford Street and went shopping, which left me £80 poorer. Knew that was a bad idea. Or maybe not, cos I bought Jasper Fforde's Lost In A Good Book, Douglas Adams' The Salmon Of Doubt, David Lynch's Dune, Hitchcock's Rear Window and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, amongst other things. All discounted, of course, since I am a cheapskate. The Jasper Fforde was bought because I'm now about 150 pages into the prequel to it, which you should be able to see on the sidebar. One of the most entertaining reads I've had in months :)

Shocking phones

Fed up with those annoying people talking too loudly into their mobiles on the train? This article could make you smile!

As part of an internal research project, the team designed five prototype ?social mobiles? which modify their users' behaviour to make it less disruptive.

For example, the first phone, called SoMo1, gives its user a mild electric shock, depending on how loudly the person at the other end is speaking. This encourages both parties to speak more quietly, otherwise the mild tingling becomes an unpleasant jolt. Such phones, the designers suggest archly, could be given to repeat offenders who persistently disturb people with intrusive phone conversations.

Story via Boing Boing.

Bees don't know the words

Sorry, just another quick news story - humming recognition software linked to a database of songs:

It's called "Query by Humming," a type of melody-recognition software program on display at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes that identifies a song by title and composer based on a person humming a few bars into a microphone.

[ . . . ]

The correct song title and artist appeared second from the top in a list of 10 possibilities, a good result considering that the software still needs tweaking and that the hummer warned in advance he could not carry a tune.

The software displays the recording's structure, identifying the notes by pitch as high and low notes, alerting the tone-deaf to where their melody fell apart. It checks the result with its own small database of songs.

Tweaks

So, Part One of tweaking the design is the !!NEW!! background image and slightly different A.link:hover properties.

What do you mean, you didn't notice?

Je suis francaise

I'm probably French?

You've rejected the Anglo-Saxon mentality lock, stock and barrel. Given to displays of emotion, activity and a love of life's good things, you're intolerably un-English. Let's face it, you're probably French.

Take the "How English are you?" test at the Guardian website.

I hate browsers

Having now got home and looked at the !!NEW!! background image with other browsers, the positioning appears to be slightly very muchly f*cked up in Opera and Mozilla, and very likely every lbooyd browser apart from IE, which I was using at school when I stuck in tulips.jpg.

I've said it before (in many different situations), and I'll say it again:

Grr.

It is for reasons like this that I wouldn't dare to look at my pages in NS4; it might just leave me climbing the walls. And now, instead of spending the evening redesigning my site (which I was planning on doing) I've got to start looking up how to do CSS image properties correctly for non-IE browsers, and very likely swearing at my computer.

Bleh.

Too many smilies

Yay! It now works (and with only an hour of effort, too :)

You might not have noticed, but that was a sarcastic smiley. Maybe I should start using animé smileys, then I could convey emotions such as (-_-) [which means: "He gets angry but he doesn't express his emotion so much outside"] or p(^^)q ["He waves flags for cheering you. We use this mark for encouraging someone else"]. I have never been more aware of the limited range of conventional smileys since looking at this (slightly scary) webpage!

Anyway, re: the CSS positioning, I was using background-position-x:30%; and background-position-y:150px; as suggested by... um, some website that I now can't find. Never mind; I should have been (and now am) using background-position: 30% 150px;. Now I know.

And by the way, I'm not consciously going for the 'biggest number of posts in one day' award (I think that would go to someone participating in Blogathon). It just so happens that there's been a lot today for me to blog. It makes up for this afternoon's post being the first in five days, though!

Ptui

"Yay! It now works"

In fact, it doesn't. For no reason whatsoever that I can see, it apparently works when I test it on my computer, but not when I upload it.

Ptui. (I'm running out of pseudo-swear words; I'm going to have to resort to real ones soon.)

Tables begone!

You know you've been using the computer too much when:

1. You're writing notes in class, with headings, subheadings, etc., and you want to implement a stylesheet so that you can just enclose the heading text with ‹h3›‹/h3› without having to change alignment, get out ruler to underline, etc.
2. As you're humming there is a slight rasp to your tone because you need to clear your throat; at a low level of consciousness you think: "nasty sound quality, the bitrate must be too low."

I kid you not. Maybe I should spend some more time in the real world?

Barring that, I'm going to have a tentative go at redesigning bent back tulips. Properly. Using CSS instead of tables. Which may be a bad move, seeing as the only CSS I've learned has been gleaned by looking at other people's stylesheets and practically copy&pasting. If that goes well, I may even try to install Movable Type.

And here's a brilliant article from The Onion: U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections.

The chocolate-making capabilities of [Willy] Wonka's heavily fortified compound have long been a source of speculation. Wonka, defying international calls for full disclosure, has maintained his silence regarding his factory's suspected capacity to manufacture confections of mass deliciousness.

[ . . . ]

"Wonka has shown himself to be a man who cannot be trusted," Annan said. "Whether misrepresenting himself as a limping cripple, only to drop at the last moment into an agile somersault, or exploiting the deepest and most personal character flaws of misbehaving children, Wonka has been a man of shifty, undetermined motives and baffling ends. He must be stopped."

Shameless copycat

So, it looks like we might be in for a bit more snow today. Here though, just on the outskirts of London, a heavy two-minute snowstorm was the extent of our winter weather this morning, and the snow's gone already. If we do get any more, I hope that it will have melted by Tuesday - the day of my driving test, which I'd really like not to get cancelled. However, it would save me the possibility of being carjacked in the middle of my test (the poor guy has to retake it now).

To add to yesterday's list (although I think this one is slightly more common):

When scribbling a note in longhand (with a pen), you write your smileys sideways. Without noticing.

Okay, I normally Don't Do these tests, but...

Which HTML tag are you?

Oh, and in a magnificent reversal of roles, Kazaa is now suing the film and recording industries under claims that they are monopolising entertainment.