It not a joke!!! It is the truth!!!

Ooops - where's my mobile?

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:49:40 GMT

Somewhere at Wicksteed Park, probably, but exactly where is unknown.

Amusingly, all three reported missing phones there were pink, and they even had one metallic pink sliding Samsung handed in... but a different model to mine.

Anyway, I have a spare, but assume my mobile phonebook is gone, so please fill in the poll if you'd like to let me know / remind me of your phone number...

View Poll: Ooops - where's my mobile?

Phrases you don't see every day...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:11:26 GMT

"Traditional Afro-Peruvian songs" - unless there really are strong musical links between Africa and Peru (this track is also reckoned to be have input from Spain and Hong Kong too!)

Standard rooms - if you want one, book now!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:28:57 GMT

Some sharp eyed readers noticed the disappearance of the 'standard' (shared toilets, smaller kitchens) room option from the lovely bicon2008.org.uk website in the past couple of days.

This was because we had 90 such rooms allocated to us and a rush of bookings around London Pride meant that we had 88 people wanting them.

Fortunately, we have been able to get more... but if you haven't booked yet and want one, please take this as a final warning that the supply is limited and when this batch goes, that's it, there are no more to be had.

"BiCon 2008 - if you miss it, you'll be kicking yourself until next year's, and that one won't be as good :)" as I said on the stall at Pride...

Just got back from buying theatre tickets for July 15th...

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:58:15 GMT

... 2009.

In case you haven't seen it mentioned, next year Jude Law is doing Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh, and as you might expect, half the run is already sold out.

Set the video

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:49:23 GMT

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Channel 4, 12:40pm to 2:20pm, School for Scoundrels (the original one, based on the 'Lifemanship' books). English film comedy at its best.

I hope you're also recording Capricorn One, on now, if you haven't already got it. One of the great paranoia / government conspiracy comedy thrillers.

First rule of IT: never be the first on your block

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:45:44 GMT

I finally got around to downloading Firefox 3 this afternoon, and so far I'm very impressed.

One of my little habits is to have lots of tabs open. Browsing LJ produces about thirty per day, with interesting stuff / posts to respond to later. These add up :) and it's not unusual to have six or seven hundred open.

Firefox 2 had problems with this. I've got plenty of RAM, so FF2 taking just under 1G wasn't a big issue, but it could get slooow to open a new tab and, especially, to download something. CPU usage would go to 100% and I couldn't do anything with FF2 for several minutes. I more or less had to set the FF2 process to 'below normal' priority, or it would interfere with everything else. Restoring all of the tabs after a restart took a while too.

FF3, on the other hand, is still usable! It can download things and keep working! Reloading a couple of hundred tabs takes about two minutes, not over ten!

The add-on that makes this possible, Tab Mix Plus, isn't officially working with FF3, but you can get a development build from the developers here. Highly recommended.

Oh, I forgot to also update the AdBlock Plus add-on, which filters out lots of ads. My ghod, some sites are hideous without it - I'd forgot just how many ads they want to have. Even more recommended.

Hello world

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:18:52 GMT

The power went off just after nine this morning. A big plume of smoke could be seen towards Crystal Palace and we had a call from someone coming over that the trains weren't going along one of the two lines near us.

A call from someone closer revealed that it was an electricity sub-station going bang, and could he come over to do some washing because it looked like taking four or five hours before the fire was extinguished and - apparently - might be days before power would be restored.

Gosh that was frightening... Never mind having to do all clothes and dish washing by hand, with cold water (gas heating/hot water, but electric pumps), never mind quite probably no school for JA next week, never mind losing a recently refilled freezer's worth of food... no internet!

Fortunately, it came back a few minutes ago, so the power cut was about three hours long.

How long is civilization meant to be away from breaking down? As someone who grew up quite happily with power cuts in the early 70s (miners strikes leading to coal shortages at power stations) it feels like it got shorter.

Now the drapes are drawn and the lights are out

Sun, 25 May 2008 19:58:30 GMT

If you'll find this post interesting, you probably already know this, but Sparks are playing their entire back catalogue in a series of 'one album at a time' concerts in London.

Annoyingly, by the time I heard about it, the timeless classic Kimono My Way had sold out so I missed it again (they did it as part of the Royal Festival Hall's 'Meltdown' a couple of years ago), but amazingly Plagiarism (effectively the greatest hits reworked) and Lil' Beethoven (which formed the second half of the Meltdown show and demonstrates that over thirty years on, their talent is an incredible asset) are still available.

Had I not had various other commitments (and heard about it early enough) I'd have been very tempted to see the lot (there was a discounted 'golden ticket' option to do that). But - delightfully - there's a live stream of the concerts here. No.1 In Heaven starts in about ten minutes...

There goes the 19th Century...

Fri, 23 May 2008 22:30:32 GMT

January: PC Pro talks about Microsoft being the 'partner' digitising the entire 19th Century stock of the British Library - "Microsoft and Google have both been digitising books from US libraries and adding them to their rival online services for some time, and the British Library opted to partner with the former. Choosing Microsoft as a partner for any archiving project brings not only a wealth of experience and financial clout, but also a degree of controversy..."

May: Microsoft abandons the entire 'Live Search Books' project (and 'Live Search Academic'). But hey, they will start to "offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers", i.e. split ad revenue. If you're in the US.

Particularly if you've been following ciphergoth's US election posts

Tue, 20 May 2008 12:13:15 GMT

The New Republic asked various Hilary Clinton staff about why she lost.

Get Maplin's email newsletter?

Tue, 20 May 2008 08:31:48 GMT

Had one after 22nd April? Can you comment with the email link to claim the discount vouchers?

Although I've been getting this for ages, I haven't had one since then, and the voucher URL in that expired a week ago. Of course I now want something (someone cut through the phone line outside while cutting the hedge).

The basic format of the discount URL stays the same each time, but there are a few random digits and my quick guess isn't working. Obviously I'll change the URL so it's linked to my email address, but replies are screened anyway...

Bill Gates gives $100m to fight HIV, $421m to fight Linux

Mon, 12 May 2008 18:41:40 GMT

Found during a search for something else...

"We do hate to rain on a high-profile corporate love-fest, but we have to point out that in addition to the much trumpeted $100 million Billg has donated to India's fight against HIV, he's funding the Microsoft jihad against Linux to the far more impressive tune of $421 million. That means that Linux is more than four times worse than AIDS to Billg..."

More here.

It's not over until...

Sun, 11 May 2008 21:18:02 GMT

Wigan 0 - 2 Manchester United

Why one newspaper described the 1-5 odds on MU winning the Premiership as '20% interest' (for every five pounds bet, you'd have won a pound).

Bolton 1 - 1 Chelsea

Why I still think I was right not to bet on it... Chelsea were expected to beat Bolton even more than MU were expected to beat Wigan. If the results had been the other way around, the bet would have been lost.

Theatre

Sat, 10 May 2008 22:42:07 GMT

Yesterday evening was an adaptation of Barber of Seville ("of Saville Row") at Greenwich. There have been some trims of the original, but it could do with a few more, and one of the additions doesn't really work (audience participation policeman's song from Pirates of Penzance!?) but the basics were fine.

Today I semi-randomly saw Happy Now? at the National. It turns out to be the last day, but I hope it's going to transfer because it's very very good. It's been a while since a two hour play had me laughing and thinking throughout.

Sue George's blog now available as a feed here

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:01:27 GMT

I keep forgetting to visit her excellent 'Bisexuality and beyond' site, so it's now available as a feed here.

Before I put it back on the street / Freecycle it...

Tue, 06 May 2008 15:22:11 GMT

Does anyone (in London) want a Time Computers PC?

Probably about seven or eight years old. Curved mini-tower case, uses this motherboard, so it's an 750MHz or less Athlon with 512M RAM.

It was outside someone's house this morning - I've just taken the hard drive for L15's PC, but it's otherwise complete (RAM, CPU, network card, optical drive, floppy drive, cables). I've no idea if it works, but it looks clean inside.

Why couldn't that have happened earlier?

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:22:12 GMT

1. I've been very impressed with the latest Ubuntu release since its alpha release days.

The one exception relates to my wireless card (a ralink based one) - using it was leading to kernel panics ('blue screen' lockups for Windows users). Fortunately that seems to have been cured by installing 'backports modules' (i.e. an updated version of the drivers). Hooray, but...

2. In the snooker semi-final against Stephen Hendry, Ronnie O'Sullivan was simply awesome. No-one else has ever won twelve frames in a row against Stephen, and it wasn't because he was playing poorly. In the final, however, Ronnie has looked mortal even if his opponent isn't taking advantage.

It's doubly annoying because it was always likely that Stephen could have beaten either of the other two semi-finalists to win his eighth world title.

He's smarter than you, he's got a science degree

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:09:28 GMT

I don't think I've spotted this on the UK bits of my friends list: the producers of Expelled, the bilge of a film about how 'intelligent design' is being cruelly treated by people with a brain, paid someone to do a video, Beware the Believers, dissing Richard Dawkins.

It looks like they went to the wrong person. The video is here, and so much of it is funny because it's true.

Two recent theatre trips

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:44:30 GMT

Contains Violence Lyric Hammersmith

Utterly genius idea - the audience watch what's going on in a building across the square from the theatre's outside balcony. Binoculars and headphones are provided. Rear Window, voyeurism.. how can it go wrong?

Well, I'd seen a couple of reviews which suggested it had, so I went with fairly low expectations, but even so it's the biggest missed opportunity since the last time the England football team were in a penalty shoot-out. The author has managed to make murder and bisexual desire boring, argh.

But remember, it's not over until the penguin tidies up. If you can last that long, which most of the audience didn't.

Into the Hoods

A hip-hop adaptation of the fabulous Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods? Well it was either going to be great or a disaster, so I had to see which.

And the answer is neither, really. If Sondheim and Lapine get any of the royalties for this, they should think themselves lucky - virtually nothing is taken from Woods. The first half is more or less the same as the second, for example.

Having said that the dancing is very good, but then it's basically an 'urban' ballet to an assortment of hip-hop tracks. With the exception of someone who comes on stage at the start to perform a couple of poems, I reckon everyone is miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack.

But the dancing is great, and the kids in particular will be up for awards.

I'll admit to having doubts about the result until the end but...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:15:48 GMT

That's why I remain a huge fan of Stephen Hendry...

Jarndyce vs M&S moves on

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:25:11 GMT

I mentioned the long-standing dispute between the UK tax authorities and a retailer of teacakes back in 2005. At that point, it had been going on for over a decade and was heading off to the European Court of Justice.

They've just sided with M&S. Mind you, they've passed the final decision back to the UK courts.

All this is over about £100,000 from memory. Lawyers fees will be in the millions.

lazyweb: pres.. ent.. ations

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:34:50 GMT

In OpenOffice.org Presentation / MS PowerPoint, many people have

* one line

* appearing

* at a time

rather than everything on a slide at once.

I do this by copying the slide several times, then deleting text, so that slide 1 has 'one line', slide 2 has 'one line / appearing' and slide 3 has the lot.

Is there an easier way?

Frankenstein at Greenwich Theatre London until

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:59:52 GMT

I will do a proper comment on this 'soon', but the basic review is 'see it!'

TWO FOR ONE TICKET OFFER

FRANKENSTEIN
UNTIL SAT 5 APRIL

Victor Frankenstein is an ambitious young student who discovers the secret of giving life to inanimate material. He assembles a creature from dead body parts and succeeds in giving it life, but horrified by the result, he abandons his creation, leaving it to fend for itself, learn the cruelty of mankind and ultimately exact its terrible revenge. Remaining true to the original Victorian novel, Mary Shelley's classic tale is brought to life in this stunning new adaptation.

“INSTANTLY IMPRESSIVE... EARTH-SHAKING” The Stage

Call Box Office on 020 8858 7755 and quote "e-flyer Frankenstein offer"

Forgive me friendslist, for I have sinned

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:39:05 GMT

I bought the Mail on Sunday. Just for the DVD (the fabulous Time Bandits, source of 'we agreed, no leaders') but even so I feel dirty and not in a nice way.

From yendi a couple of weeks ago

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:29:38 GMT

Readings of Anglo-Saxon poetry. All of the known works, eventually.