February 26, 2004  

it's 12ga, you know 25 february 2004

Had a good exchange this morning, immediately prior to getting a dental x-ray:

Dental technician: Can you remove all your jewellery, please?
Me: Not without a pair of expanding pliers, no.

How far we've come: nine years ago, when I first had my lip and nipple pierced, dentists would have freaked out at this one. These days, the dental technician didn't bat an eyelid, and took the film around the earring in question (left conch). Mind you, she was about 20, and has probably had her navel pierced since she was 15.

And a big shout out to Doctor Diablo, the latest addition to the squared circle. I'd thought Cat was joking when she said that one of our mates was wrestling professionally. Nice one that man.

RoboHelp: best of breed, but still shite. So I'm updating an online help file that has a copyright statement in it - including the copyright symbol, ©. Now, we've traditionally just typed it in (ALT+0169 on a windows box, kids!), and this causes a few problems when the pages are rendered on the user's machine. This is usually if their PC is using some odd locale that has problems with ISO8859 Latin-1 character encoding, which some of our customers do. Fortunately, HTML is pretty robust about this sort of thing, and the © character entity resolves to a copyright symbol when the page is rendered by the user's browser. So far, so fine. So I do a search and replace, replacing the literal © with © throughout. Then I check the source - it doesn't seem to have worked. Did I do it right? Hmm. Looked OK. Do it again - still doesn't seem to work. Hmm. So I manually edit one of the files to replace the text, save it, close the file and reopen it - and discover that Robohelp helpfully replaces HTML character entities with the literal character equivalent whenever it opens a file. The stupidity of this makes my fingers bleed. You can stop it doing this - by using the "Insert symbol" menu command, at which point it'll insert two lines of text, including a stylesheet reference, with the character reference (as a numeric ref- in this case, © rather than the common name form) buried in the middle. It's a steaming pile of elephantine shite, I tell you.

Much respect to me Heather for spotting this article on Salon - "We don't support that". This is pretty much exactly what it was like when I worked phone support for a would-be major PC manufacturer shortly after my arrival in the UK. I was there for a total of two months, because I took slightly too long to hand in my resignation (two days after the four week probationary period, damnit). I've never had a worse job, and I wanted to leave from day two - but it took me a while to jack up the interview. In any case, it was character building. Mainly the sort of character that resolved not to have to put up with that sort of bullshit again, and to get another job as quickly as possible, which I duly did.

Just sold my first ever item on Ebay. It's fun watching the price jump 40% in the last ten minutes.

February 25, 2004  

smells like teen spirulina 24 february 2004

So we've been a bit floored by colds in the last few days. Get it out of the way early, that's my outlook. Handy, really, since I've spent most of last week and the weekend either flat on my back or full of cold and whinging appropriately. Heather got it a couple of days later, but (unusually) seems to have got it a lot less. Or it could be that the specific discomfort of the cold is getting lost in the background noise of general malaise that's affecting H at the moment. Either way, she's dealing really well with it. As compared to me: I don't usually get sick, so when I do I tend to play it up a bit. Unconsciously, I hasten to add, but nonetheless. Anyway, the cold seems to have degenerated into a mild sinus infection (for both of us), so we're just wandering around feeling like our faces are about to explode, but otherwise no worse than average.

For those of you who've been asking for it: updated photos. Specifically including kitchen photos and nursery photos. Hope that satisfies the relevant curiousities. Pictures of nursery inhabitant in situ as soon as the aforementioned makes an appearance.

Sounds like it's absolute murder back home right at the moment. From what I've been able to tell from the news reports, most of the bottom of the North Island is now doing a fair impression of Atlantis (quick! Flee around the world and take your sacred knowledge, sharing it only with the most credulous and easily fleeced!). I've heard phrases like "worst natural disaster since the Napier earthquake" bandied around. So can I just say, to all of our mates who've been in NZ recently (and there's a lot of you: for some reason, large numbers of our UK mates have all decided to see the Land of the Long White Cloud at the same time, and power to you all), it's not normally this damp. Though I'd have to concede that it probably is normally this windy. And a special shout out to Jared & Sharyn, who had the slightly unfortunate experience of trying to get a hotel room in Wellington the same weekend as the Bowie gig and a major motorcycle gathering. Still, at least you lucky buggers got to see Return of the King at the Embassy, which is one of the main things that we're looking forward to doing next time we hit NZ.

Which, incidentally, will probably be in October. Not sure if I've mentioned that or not, but we'll pretty definitely be back in NZ for a few weeks in or around this October/November. We'll be turning up mob-'anded in Auckland, pootling down to Wellington, and hopefully having a bit of a crack at some of the South Island for a few days. More news as events warrant (i.e. when we get some tickets sorted).

I'm taking my first tentative steps onto Ebay as a seller. That is, we've got 6 sq metres of tiles left over from the kitchen (don't ask), so we need to get rid of the buggers. Shipping could be interesting: as far as I can tell, the whole pile of tiles weighs about 75-odd kg, which puts it at about the same weight as a medium-sized cadaver. Needless to say, I'm trying to sell to someone who can collect. Interested buyers should look here. Ah, it's a change from the first time I went on Ebay, where I was a bit drunk and ended up buying a set of stamps. In my defence, they were very nice stamps.

Link shamelessly stolen from Steve. Cycling to work is the fastest way to go in Auckland. OK, it's just a stunt, but it's a good one.

One of the local outdoor shops is closing down, and they're having a sale. So I stopped by, picked up a few things - couple of OS maps I've been after for a while, parka, that sort of thing. One thing they had in abundance and were merrily flogging off was a strange collapsible bag-thing with a mesh top. It wasn't until I saw that a whole bin of these things had been labelled "boot bags" that I realised what they were - something you can sling your mud-covered boots into so that they can safely be transported in the bottom of a pack, back of the car, etc. Which lead me to wonder: why spend £10 on a specially made item for this? Why not just use a bloody plastic bag, price nil when you buy a pint of milk (as you are, of course, wont to do)? Tch. People just ain't thinkin'.

February 19, 2004  

waitin' for the man/woman 18 february 2004

The DIY is now done. The nursery is ready, the doors are all varnished, the kitchen is finished. Anything that's still a bit iffy is henceforth standard maintenance. And in that spirit, I'm going to be spending a bit of time putting up various hooks to hang mobiles, curtain holdbacks, etc. Nothing too arduous, mind, and we're basically at the hurry up and wait stage of the pregnancy. Fun. We've packed our bags, and we're ready to go.

This is quite an interesting article. A journalist decides to give performance-enhancing drugs a try and see what all the fuss is about. Upshot: they're expensive, they're effective, and there's some bloody worrying people out there. Interesting reading a fairly balanced perspective on performance enhancing drugs, although the most compelling image I found in it was when the author got onto a pro-anabolics website and was mocked for the low dosages he was taking (which were what a doctor prescribed as sensible, and were certainly making changes to his body). Interesting stuff, and it certainly gave me more perspective on what half my spam is trying to sell me.

Today's theme tune: the club mix of Ich und Elaine by 2raumwohnung.

We had a good time last night playing around with the TENS machine. We've hired one of these as a means of pain relief in early labour. It's an interesting bit of kit: basically, you stick electrodes to yourself, and it passes a mild (controllable) electric current between them. It's supposed to interfere with the passage of pain impulses to the brain. To be frank, I'm not sure if it does this, but it's definitely fun to play with. As I'm unlikely to be getting significant pain on the day, I was nominated as the guinea pig to check what it was like. In the spirit of scientific exploration, I suck the electrodes to my forearms, and put the machine on. Nowt. I turned it up. No effect. I unplugged the lead and plugged it back in. Nothing. I put it up to maximum intensity, fastest pulse. Still nothing. Clearly the effect was more subtle than I'd been lead to believe. And then I must have jiggled the machine slightly, causing the battery to make a proper connection with the terminals, because I suddenly got god knows how many volts straight across my forearm. At half-second intervals. The effect was interesting - all the muscles under the current contracted, causing my arm to jerk around like someone undergoing a bad fit (which, in a very localised sense, I was). My fingers were spasming, my arm was jerking up and then falling down when the current abated, and as far as any conscious effort went, I was completely relaxed. It was a really odd feeling, just watching myself move without any conscious direction. It creeped Heather out, partially because it looked pretty odd but mostly because she was aware that she was going to have the machine attached to her in a bit. Anyway, once we turned the power down a bit the spasms became more manageable, and I'm sure they'll be much less worrying in the small of the back. Still, it was pretty cool, and I'm very tempted to have another go with it on my calves or something. Not that I'm an addict, mind.

God bless the internet, part XVII: Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley's idealism.

And in other news... RIP Marco Pantani. He may have had a controversial career, but he was a damn good rider, and he'll be missed.

Day eighteen without alcohol. I'm now mainly fine, except for a regular fit of sweating somewhere between three and four pm every day. Odd one, that. Related: Guardian article on giving up the booze for a bit. Except that bugger does it for two months, which strikes me as frankly masochistic.

February 11, 2004  

tungsten forged my arse 10 february 2004

If I never see another masonry drill bit again... I never knew that drill bits were consumables. I'd sort of thought that you bought a good drill bit, and then you used it for the rest of your natural life or until you lost it. Then I was in Mackays the other day, and saw that they were selling drill bits in packs of ten of the same size, for jobbing builders. This implied that a certain degree of consumption was involved. And, over a weekend of putting numerous rawl plugs into various walls, I can confirm this. I've definitely managed to blunt one of the bits, and to significantly bend a 7mm masonry drill bit. Given that the thing is stupidly overbuilt, I am honestly not sure how I did it, but bent it is. The tip wavers from left to right by about a centimetre. Towards the end it wasn't so much drilling a hole as bashing its way through the wall - or not, rather. The end result was basically a shallow, wide, bloody useless hole. Ah well. We managed to get all the rawl plugs in, and I now know to replace my drill bits.

The nursery is now more or less done, thank God. The walls are painted, the doors are varnished, so are the big shelves, and they're in place and screwed to the walls. Now it's allan key ho, and away we go assembling the flat-pack furniture. Hey, how hard can it be to assemble a cot? I reckon I should be able to knock the damn thing off tonight. Further bulletins as events warrant.

OK, so we all know that the US has a worrying preponderance of right-wing Christian nutjobs in high power. But that's kinda indirect, so most people don't notice the day-to-day effect too much. But this kind of Christian nutjob in a position of authority is more than a little proximately worrying. Talk about bloody worrying.

I got the best piece of spam today. Not sure what the content was, but by gum the subject line rocked out. It's nearly haiku:

Re: Suspended Account Eula - bottle of beer 647 ballerinas

C'mon, that sounds like a lost surrealist masterpiece from the 20s.

DJ Format is god. Music for the Mature B-Boy is the best hip-hop album I've heard since Blackalicious' Blazing Arrow. Good beats, loops, and some crunchy fuzz, with excellent rapping by a succession of guest MCs (notably Abdominal, plus some good stuff by Charli 2na & Akil). Excellent backing and stellar rapping: Abdominal's lyrics on The Hit Song, for instance, are witty, tight, and fresh as all hell. Sort of thing you listen to over and over again to try and decipher every last little nuance. Rock.

Day ten without alcohol: it's actually really liberating not to have a hangover every morning. I should try this more often. In other news, I find myself seriously considering swallowing my mouthwash out of desperation. Focus: willpower will get me through this.

February 07, 2004  

not that we're nervous 6 february 2004

We learned two important lessons from this week's ante-natal classes:

• Midwives tend to have a big problem with doctors, and indeed with the medical establishment as a whole.
• Loud, annoying twerps breed too.

Still pretty positive about the whole thing, but I can't help but shake the nagging feeling that if the midwife had spent less time slagging off the "medicalisation" of birth the class wouldn't have overrun quite so much. I was also less than impressed with her showing the class the needle used to guide the epidural - yes, it does look scary, but so do forceps and she didn't seem quite so vehemently negative about them. Spending ten minutes putting the wind up pregnant women about epidurals doesn't help things, especially when she admitted that 50% of women at the Rosie end up having one.

Day six without booze: hands have stopped shaking. This makes driving much easier.

So "unscripted programming" (i.e. reality-based shows) is the big thing on telly at the moment. I've been playing trendspotter recently, and I reckon that the most dominant forms of programming at the moment are:

• History re-enacted - subdivided into your standard historical program, but with the good bits played by actors, dramatizations of actual historical events, or "how would the youth of today cope in [the Blitz/the Normandy landings/a 50s school dinner regime/etc]". Obviously, these tend to concentrate on military campaigns, with an emphasis on particular triumphs of stuff-ups. Too many to list, but tend to be hosted by Adam Hart-Davies or Tony Robinson. Usually shown either before 8pm or, if particularly violent or they mention incest, after 9.
• Property porn - typically, a knowledgeable presenter or two providing some form of "help"/criticism while Average Members of the Public (subtext: It Could Be You!) do something with property (typically buying or renovating). Typical examples would be Location Location Location, Grand Designs, and Property Ladder, although Changing Rooms and other DIY programs are pretty close to this category. Always broadcast between 8 and 9.
• Class porn - a variety of premises, but with the unspoken premise that funny/compelling things happen when you put people of one social class into the role of another. See for example Wife Swap, Faking It, Holiday Swap, etc. The truly posh very rarely have much to do with this, so it tends to be the upper middle class vs the utter plebs. The class aspect is never mentioned. Typical examples:
  • Wife of noveau riche v well off type swaps roles with benefit-bunny with eight children.
  • Goth cycle courier from Manchester tries to pass himself off as experienced polo player.
  • Family that normally holidays in a simply splendid little gite in the Dordogne go to the Costa del Sol - and vice versa.
  The humour is normally from watching plebs make mistakes, trying to fit in with the toffs. Occasionally, for variety, it's watching the toffs get humiliated trying to fit in with the plebs. A well designed example can often manage to squeeze both in in the same show.
  Not that I think that this is a particularly British thing, mind - I can see the same sort of programs going over well in most of the world. The underlying driver, class, is never mentioned, and that'd fit nicely with the parts of the world (the rest of it, basically) that has an implicit class system but doesn't like to admit it. C'mon: you don't think that a show that had a nice student from the King's School in Christchurch trying to pass himself off as a shearer (or vice versa!) wouldn't go down a treat in NZ? Everyone likes to see the class structure implicitly confirmed by watching fish out of water: it confirms the suspicion that there's an underlying structure to society, and that's kind of comforting in an odd way.
  Normally broadcast after 9pm.
• Celebrity schadentelly: the D-list being humiliated, basically. Too numerous to list, but I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is the obvious at the mo.
  Term 'schadentelly' credited to Heather, who emphasises that it should strictly be used to describe all reality TV shows of any sort.

That's the current line-up. Food porn is much less common than it was two years ago - I think this is due to the recent stratospheric rise in property prices in the UK, such that greed has overtaken gluttony in the public's interests. Food porn will probably make a comeback once the market crashes, and comfort food is our only refuge from the crushing financial burden of the mortgage.

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