Sissiphus' stone kept temporarily at bay

It's four in the morning, and in the last six hours I've drunk a bottle of 1999 Marlborough Gold New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and finally filled the gaps in the Bachman section of Infinite Monkeys.

Now you can see in all their glory almost every single bit of web or print design I have ever done (you would not believe how long it took to make and then upload all those GIFs and JPEGs), trawl through the long lists of every thing I've worked on in the worlds of TV, radio and stage, and titter politely at my slightly facetious autobiography.

I hope it was worth it. One thing I discovered by the end was that 'infinitemonkeys' is very hard to type correctly hundreds and hundreds of times. Oh, and that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were singing 'with the burdens shed it's a lonely view', not 'the Burgess Shale'. I'm slightly disappointed it turns out not to be a paean to Stephen Jay Gould.

[The design page really is cumbersomely long, and I'm sure there's some much neater way I can do it. Expect another late night soon...]
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Things to do when bored at work

#37 -- Email your son that the name of his website is appropriately enough an anagram of 'fine money in skit'.
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I have been useless recently

This, however, is excellent.

Oh, and you wait all your life for an email from someone at Pyra and then one comes along like this.

From: jack@saturn.org

dear james,

i'm curious what makes me "a self-
obsessed arse." if you could fill
me in, i'd appreciate it.

--jack--

I wonder if I can manage to persuade him that in England 'self-obsessed arse' is a term of endearment.
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Ah. Awards.

Bloggies, schmoggies. Come the 31st of January, I for one shall be playing my clarinet in Michael's Pub in Manhattan.

Although if there's one thing voting in these awards has done, it's introduce me to a whole host of new experiences:

Pith & Vinegar.
Virulent Memes.
Little Yellow Different. Re-run. 2xy.org=f(ab).
Neale's new-look wetlog.
Actually reading Powazek's weblog article.
Being reminded that Jack Saturn is indeed a self-obsessed arse.
Appreciating loobylu's fabulous cartooning, and the cool blue sophistication of NoahGrey.com, inexplicably withdrawn from the nominations by its creator.
Wondering whether the words 'since January 1, 1999' undermine the phrase 'lifetime achievement'.
Discovering that there appears to be no such thing as a good weblog about weblogs.
And realising that the nomations for most humorous weblog just aren't funny.

'It's been educational.'
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excellent creativity, exceptionally clean

Something I've been meaning to note for a while are the clean and simple lines of the redesign at extenuating circumstances. Unfortunately it's proving very difficult to access at the moment -- I keep suffering from connection failures. Anyhoo, it's a wonderful example of paucity in design, and a snappy and creative use of a simple piece of DHTML. Why on Earth it doesn't work properly in Netscape 6, I have no idea, but I've bitched about that before.
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Busy, busy bee

Not much here recently because I've been a) building furniture and b) working on something new. I haven't made the new thing public so if you happen to stumble across it, lucky you.

In other news, Tom's theory that IMDb ratings and Oscar winners are connected finds itself backed up with a little more weight after the results of the Golden Globe Awards.

I've got Photoshop 6. I don't know if I like it yet.
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Strangely this continues to be funny

Despite changing my Amazon password, thanks to the annoying magic of cookies Robert is still able to continue fucking with my wishlist. My favourite so far has to be:

'1001 Things to Do With Your Kids
Caryl Waller Krueger; Paperback
Usually dispatched in 1-2 weeks
£9.14

Your comment:
I hope it's better than his last book, One Thing to Do With Your Kid.

Robert, you are and shall remain an amusing man. (For the record, anything with a comment is not a choice of mine.)
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From outta nowhere

Reid, I don't think you need to worry. The amount of click-through I get from your site, you must be very popular.
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Simple pleasures

Walking home tonight (slightly pissed I might add) the mist in the air has crystallised on the pavement in thousands of tiny fragments that glittered up at me like a carpet of diamonds. The freezing cold can be beautiful.
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Brings back old memories

Exploding Fist -- a new blog I discovered yesterday that seems to have (and please someone correct me if I am wrong here) a screen grab from the old BBC Micro game of the same name as its masthead. Ah the BBC Micro Model B. A fine machine. I have one here in my very own home as a matter of fact, nestled silently next to my Mac. Occasionally I turn it on and marvel at its simplicity, the amazing inventiveness of the programmers who managed to squeeze vast swathes of processing power and game enjoyment out of only 64K* of memory. And then I turn it off and get back to using my proper computer which can actually do things.

*I originally had this down as 64Mb until Rory pointed out to me that that's the same amount of memory as an entry level iMac. Amazing how alien the idea of a kilobyte has become, and how common the megabyte, indeed gigabyte, seems.
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Not so hard after all

Rory has pointed out to me that someone at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia* has for some time run a page devoted to calculating the minimum number of links between actors using the definitive film and TV data held on IMDb.

Oh bloody hell. That fucks SDoTH up a little, doesn't it?

However I may just keep it going for the simple reason that all the links this search engine produces are rather dry and obscure, whereas the ones I receive from you lovely readers tend to have something of a human side to them. What I'm saying is that if you send me a result calculated by the University of Virginia's Computer Science Department server I reckon I could spot it because I honestly believe that most people haven't seen a tenth of the films it uses to link these people in such short lists. To paraphrase the words of Hannibal Lecter, 'Don't cheat because I'll know.'

*Of course now I've told you about it you'll all be using it and fleecing me out of house and home as I succumb to my moral duty to provide you with prize-winning gifts.
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It turns out I wasn't kidding

SDoTH prizes are winging their way to Rory (two Will Sutcliffe novels*), and Katy (a feather boa -- although I have no idea whether she knows that she's even got it). Now all I need to do is find out how to send something (and indeed what) to Robert Johnson and David Gibson.

Keep up the good work, kids.

*Let's face it: novellas.
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Here comes another one...

In the spirit of Nico's gallery of British blogs under the influence of Linux, and the odd discussion or two about WebTV recently, I give you all your favourite blogs as interpreted by a WebTV viewer.
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I'm like the Soup Dragons

All thanks to Jen for making one for me. (My browser kept crashing.) And so finally I can jump onboard the bandwagon:

It could almost be me. If perhaps you were looking at me in a horizontally concave mirror.
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As stale as the top of a loaf of Hovis Crusty

I've been looking at a lot of simple, nicely designed blogs and I think I'm a bit tired of the fact that we all use the same way of presenting our information: in tall, thin, vertical table like a receipt from a massive shop at Sainsbury's. It's about time someone designed a new way to present the user with a blog. I think I might have a go. Though on past form it will almost certainly take a while so don't get your hopes up just yet.

In the meantime, why not look at Matt's half-finished DHTML photography site, CPP | 2000, which made me think about this in the first place.
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Coincidence?

Tom@plasticbag has been recommending sites from a book on innovative web design he's been reading called 72dpi, one of which is the bizarrely horrific H. R. Giger/Darren Aronofsky-esque greyscale.net.

Investigation of this site takes you to this page which contains down the bottom a link to something called V.Twin Laboratories whose splash page contains a link to... you've guessed it... plasticbag.

Actually it's plasticbag.de not .org, but still, makes you think, doesn't it? As Harry Hill is often found to be commenting: "What are the chances of that happening?"
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An Englishman's wishlist is his castle

In a well-deserved attempt to point out the dangers of making your password your name, Robert's been fucking with my Amazon wishlist.
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The real Ginger

What could IT be? Here's some ideas. I chuckled quietly to myself.
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Rest easy, my little ones

It's alright. They said there's nothing wrong with me.
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"What d'you think I am? A statistic?"

If you live in London, or are going to be there before February 3rd, go and see The National Theatre of Brent's The Messiah at The Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush. Patrick Barlow and John Ramm as Desmond Olivier Dingle and Raymond Box will bring you two glorious hours of inspired comic lunacy; a show, like all their others, that's so bad it's brilliant. It's impossible to explain to you here how good it is, suffice it to say that when Raymond came on stage cackling madly as the evil King Herod the Great, the hat he was wearing was one of the funniest things I have seen in my life. I'm overselling it a bit, aren't I? If you haven't seen them before go and see it now, and if you have you should already have been.
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Life on the other side of the tracks

Nico has given us all a peek into an alien world: what our blogs look like under Linux. I'm amazed that there is so much inconsistency between Netscape and IE, in the sense that Netscape seems to be terminally unable to render these pages properly. (By 'Netscape' here I'm refering to Navigator 4.75.) Meg's page is overrun with bold; my sidebars are unreadably small and my carefully crafted tables ignored; Mememachine is inflicted with eye-bending fuzz; Tom's stylish blues are ravaged with extraneous carriage-returns. The only pages unaffected by this monster are Nico's itself and Katy's neatly simple design. (Maybe there's a lesson for me there.)

Mozilla 0.7 (basically Netscape 6) does actually seem to do a much better job, and I've taken the brave step of reinstalling it on my Mac. This did involve something like a two hour download as the installer I had was just for a beta, but I let it run while I slept and all was well. I don't dislike it as much as I thought I would, particularly as you can change the look of it to the old style of Navigator, but it does seem to be weirdly slow to perform some operations (dealing with automatically opened new windows, for example) and in a revolutionary attempt to measure up to Microsoft, instead of just crashing if you run Java applets like IE5*, it won't actually run them at all (which means I still can't make myself a Stor Tropper). It does render CSS very thoroughly, though. Almost too thoroughly. In fact it shows up the limitations in my own coding for my blog. It seems that to define the class of a <table> tag is not actually enough to definitively affect all the text contained in that table. Hence the random size and typeface of the body text of my posts. Obviously I shall have to look into this. After all, there may actually be some people out there who are still loyal...

*Does anyone actually know why this happens? If IE5 visits a page which contains an applet, and that applet runs, any attempt to leave the page will result in my machine freezing. It's escapable of course -- I just force IE5 to quit -- but I'd like to be able to solve the problem. If you can help me, I'd be grateful.
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A change is as good as a desk

I have finally put together the last of my new furniture, my Compound Desk from Aero. (Actually that's not true. I still have half a wardrobe to assemble but that can't be done until the last pieces are in stock at IKEA.) This new, rather snazzy, beech creation will stand guard at one end of my living room and means that I shall be moving what little exists of my 'office' (computer, piles of paper, phone) there from my conservatory. I shall miss being surrounded by glass, and the warm bit under my feet where a hot water pipe runs under the floor to the radiator. Not a ground-breaking change, I grant you -- after all, I will still be able to gaze out of the french windows at the tiny, unkempt garden that lives at the back of the house -- but my flat will be one step closer to finally being finished; something it has not been for the last year and a half. As part of my continuing quest to remove the excuse for not working properly that 'my workspace is just not quite right', these things do matter.

(I take back what I said. With the proper incorporation of its new server, Blogger has become wonderfully fast again.)
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...But not this one

Tomorrow I travel to the BUPA Centre at Kings Cross for my full health screening. It's very expensive (£300) but I need it and I'm not paying for it, and anyway according to my father who had his today they do get your money's worth as they perform an extensive amount of tests on you. I must admit that I'm slightly nervous of what they might find. In a way, if they find nothing, I won't be any better off. I'll just still have these aches and pains in my chest, without any explanation. I'm also not looking forward much to such a rigourous three hour full examination. I just wish there was a way to revise.
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An Apple a day keeps the doctor away

I've been looking at Macs all day, but how could I not notice this? Hallelujah. Rejoice all ye brethren in the glow of the new Apple PowerBooks and the improved G4 Towers. The gauntlet of the VAIO has been taken full in the face and responded to. I am orgasmic with delight at these new machines. Wehay. That screws all my difficult decisions vis-a-vis cheap Cubes and G4s totally. These new PowerBooks are a wonder to behold. Someone control me. It's a new beginning. All hail Apple. [via plasticbag]
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I am curious yellow

I like this place
Yes, I do
It's nice and neat
And yellow too
I like it
So, do you?
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There, on the stair -- a little mouse with webclogs on

The new server seems not to actually have solved any of Blogger's clogging problems. I was amazed at the speed with which I could blog a few days ago, but was probably due to the fact that frustrated users who'd given up until the problem was fixed were taking a while to realise it was okay to come back, and as a result the system wasn't really as loaded as it normally is. Now, of course, we're almost back to the same situation we were in before. Posting is still slow (not as slow as it has been, but still slow enough to be irritating) and unreliable. And no, I don't have a solution. I'm just saying.
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Less money than sense

Must... control... credit card...

Not... a... problem... Don't... actually... have... the money anyway...

Actually, I am considering upgrading my 266Mhz G3 Tower, and it's a hard decision to make. The Cube: small, sexy, powerful, yet unexpandable, and no chance of an internal Zip drive; the Tower: large, cheaper, not as fast, but infinitely more open to extra RAM, hard disk space and internal peripherals. Which would you suggest? Vote in today's poll.

*That's before VAT obviously. So it's nonsense.
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X Rated

It could have looked like this:

But instead it looks like this:

'That's going to stand out from the rest then, isn't it?', he asked painfully sarcastically. Maybe Microsoft thought people weren't ready for a miniature silver spacecraft in their living rooms, but when convention beats invention, allow me to be disappointed. Nice site, though.
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There is evil in the world

And its name is Netscape.

I was just trying to take a look at this much hyped game of Web Trumps various people are talking about, and it didn't seem to work on Internet Explorer so I thought I'd try it in a different browser. Opened up Netscape Navigator 4.something and yes, it all worked like a treat. Lovely. Until I thought, 'I wonder how my site looks in Netscape, then?'. Big mistake. Please Mummy, don't make me do it again. I don't know, I spend hours slaving over a hot HTML editor tweaking and polishing my lovingly designed pages only to have them murdered in a browser that seems to ignore both tables and Cascading Style Sheets. It was a very upsetting experience, and then it crashed and took Internet Explorer along with it making the little 'hand' disappear over links and removing anyway of getting to the editing page on Blogger. Nasty little thing. And that's just the old version. Netscape 6 is one of the most disgusting, clunky, unwieldy, stupid, ugly pieces of software I have ever had the misfortune to download. I deleted it almost immediately.

I have never gone to the trouble of testing my designs in Netscape and I shall continue not to, because anyone who uses one of their browsers deserves to see everything fucked up in front of their very eyes as punishment.

Rant over.
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That's a couple of Cola Bottles or a Cherry Loop to you and me

This has to be the most sensible solution to the Blogger problem I have yet read.

How can anyone begrudge a company whose services they use every day a dollar a month? The maths is simple. It does indeed come to somewhere between a half and a million dollars a year at current user levels. A dollar a month equates to just three cents a day. If Starbuck's put the price of your latte up by that you wouldn't even notice. Granted, it would probably have to be a little more than $12 a year to cover the banking administration costs of making Blogger a subscription service. So maybe $15. Jesus. Just do it now, Pyra. Half a million dollars. That'd come in handy, I bet.

And if actual e-commerce is a problem, why not ask people to 'donate' and, just like the requested Blogger link-back, if they don't give a minimum amount once a year remove them from the directory. That'd frustrate anyone into PayPal-ing a little cash Pyra's way.
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Six months late

I've done the about page.
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One glass of virtual prune juice later...

My prediction of a return to stone-age posting methods seems a little presumptious in the light of recent developments at Blogger: just two days of begging and they've already received enough money to buy an extra server. And by God does it make a difference. Last night I was looking at Adam Mathes' new online publishing tool Organizine and thinking to myself, 'Is this it? Is this where I abandon Blogger altogether and throw my lot in with something that actually works?'. It felt a little like I was committing adultery. After all the good, free, efficient service Blogger has provided me with since August last year, I sneak off behind their back and start screwing around with some half-baked piece of software someone created in their spare time just because it's got only seventy members rather than eighty-six thousand? Shame on me.

Actually, Organizine is a rather interesting prospect. It does give you much more control over the format and content of your posts than Blogger does, allowing you to create your own variables beyond the standard ones you would expect. The 'document' model confused me until I realised that each one is the equivalent of a Blogger 'post', just with control over the filename and built in support for titles such as I use on this blog. Archives are also much more flexibly managed. In essence, Organizine has a lot less of a fixed structure than Blogger, something which perhaps makes Blogger much easier to use initially but more restrictive in the final assessment. Not that I'm rushing to switch over. Blogger, with its purchase of a new server and another in the near future, seems to be able to guarantee smooth running through the simple fact of its age and experience; Organizine is only a couple of weeks old and when the next couple of hundred people start joining it, we might see its bandwidth limit reached and the whole site collapse. But I may start up another blog with Organizine and run it concurrently, as a sort of comparitive experiment.

Maybe.
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Webclog (cont.)

The migration back to hand-posting via ftp has begun. (And it's time to draw Rory back into our warm and fuzzy world.)
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My toaster's been burnt

Robert, presumably in a fit of temping induced boredom, has brutally lambasted my choice of a three-slot Dualit toaster*:

"Dear James

You cunt. Your fantasy on the three slot Dualit is WAYOUTALINE.

Firstly, if you mean a three slot as in two normal slots and one double-width slot for toasting a sandwich and that's what you consider to be best, then you are WAYOUTALINE.

There are three basic types of dualit. The two slot. The three slot. Ahem.

The two slot - Excellent, but too small. And not significantly cheaper than the other versions.

The four slot - a thing of beauty; a joy forever. If you're telling me you don't ever crave three slices 'o' toast (or even a whole 'fourer') then you're WAYOUTALINE. What if a friend comes round and asks for a slice or two 'o' toast and, provoked and excited by the thought, you also want a slice? What if you're frying two eggs for two fried egg sandwiches and as you wait for the second round of toast the second egg goes mangy and you catch distemper? Let's face it, when a man wants four damn slices of toast then he should have four slices of toast.

The three slot - quite possibly the most over-rated piece of over-priced gadgetry in the whole world (cf. the new Dyson Washing Machine). It's only got two slots for toasting and you know my feelings on that front. And then there's the sandwich toaster. Do you not remember your Breville Toasted Sandwich Maker your Grandmother gave you? Can you not remember your joy as you took one to Walthamstow, how we experimented with cheese and ate heartily for weeks. But can you forget that, like your mantelpiece of Terry Pratchetts, the Breville was soon forgotten. You owned it for another - what? - seven months and you never used it. I never used it. Tom often used it (but Tom would). Where is it now? If you want toasted sandwiches, then dig it out and use it.

But you don't, do you? NOBODY actually eats toasted sandwiches. There are only two occasions when people do: when they are in such a foul café that the only thing they trust to have been cooked is a toasted sandwich; and secondly when there's no other food in the house. Consider the Opportunity Cost of the sandwich section of the three slice machine. For that bi-annual pleasure of a toasted sandwich you could instead swap it for the almost daily joy of being able to put that extra slice on - no, hang the expense, I'm filling the rack.

And have you ever had a toasted sandwich in one of those slots from a Dualit? They're shit. By the time you've filled the sandwich with your ham/cheese/whatever, it's so fat that the bread toasts in three seconds flat while the insides are still stone cold. And if you make it thin enough that the insides might get hot, the brace in which you place the sandwich is of a fixed width and all the filling falls out. I have never satisfactorily had a toasted sandwich from a Dualit. Granted, I've had some nice toasted sandwiches, but they're always from cafes where they don't use Dualits, or if they do, certainly not a domestic model.

I fear you're only interested in buying this monster because you believe it to look more cool than the other models. You believe you're buying into the cool Soho café society about which you know so much. Charles Dean owns one. How do you feel now? He owns one, and he never uses it. You're like Charles.

If I want a toasted sandwich or two (after all the three slot can only do one sandwich at a time) then I make my sandwiches up and put them under the grill. Big deal.

I own a four slot. I don't know anyone else who does. That must make me really cool.

If you don't now immediately agree with me then you're WAYOUTALINE.

Love
Robert

(after all we already both have the same kettle and bin)"

How could I have been so stupid? How could I have allowed myself to be swayed by the look of an object rather than its function? I am indeed WAYOUTALINE (although in my opinion 'outa' should have two 't's). Thank you, Robert. You've saved me from public shame and humiliation. Four-slot it is:

*Look at it though. Look. It is beautiful. The handles of the sandwich holder hanging seductively over the edge. NO! Must stop...
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Webclog

Please God let Blogger have enough money to buy a new server soon. At the moment it's so slow I can only post in the mornings when the US isn't yet online, and even then it fails fifty percent of the time. PayPal still won't let me give them any money (they've got a problem registering MasterCard at the moment) which I will gladly do. I wonder if the crawl it's currently operating at will dissuade enough people from continuing their blogs that the number of subscribers falls to a manageable level again? That would be ironic.

Webclog, or at least web failure, seems to be affecting other people as well. Letsbuyit.com won't let me join the co-buy for their drastically reduced Kodak DC280 digital camera for some unexplained reason, and also refuse to answer the phone or respond to any emails. Very frustrating indeed as this is the cheapest and best digital camera (reduced from £399 to £249) I have seen on the net and the deadline for entering the co-buy expires at the end of the day.
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Brother, can you spare a dime?

Blogger is indeed frustratingly slow at the moment, sometimes to the point of seizing up entirely. So, as suggested, I thought I might give them a bit of money towards another server. Unfortunately, registering with international PayPal is even slower. Still, I managed it and should be well on my way to actually donating a tenner or so by 2002.

This will bring the amount of money I have spent today up to about £1,300. I think I might be out of control. It all went on things I needed of course (wardrobe from Ikea, desk and filing cabinet from Aero, bookshelf to be used on its side for record storage from Habitat). However the list of things I 'need' is apparently never ending. Here's a selection of stuff I still haven't got:

• a three slot Dualit toaster
• some sort of fabulous coffee table
• a DVD player
• a digital camera
• a nice comfortable chair with wheels to work from
• a Project record turntable
• a marvellously simple and classic dining table with eight butterfly chairs
• lots of money to pay for it all

Maybe I should try and persuade people to PayPal generous donations to me.

* Why Ikea make you wait forty-five minutes to collect the flat-pack boxes that won't fit in your car so you then have to give them straight back to them (or rather wait another half an hour in a queue) for home delivery, and don't just pass the stuff on to their delivery service themselves so I can sod off home instead of wasting my fucking time, I am at a loss to explain.
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It's not much like the film, is it? *

But then last year wasn't much like the comic either.

Happy New Year (no pictures of me you'll be disappointed to hear). I received two gifts today, both firsts for me:

1. No hangover. It's amazing what 'not drinking very much' will do for your constitution the next day.
2. A virus. Didn't affect me of course, because I run a system designed and built by the great and powerful Apple Computer, but Windows users beware. (Oh alright, it's actually a worm not a virus. Sod off.)

*Tom gets there ahead of me. Always paving the road for the rest of us, he is.
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