Red Nose Day is coming! It’s two weeks this coming Friday, on March 11th. I’m sure you know what a good cause this is - hundreds of thousands of people the world over have been helped by Comic Relief since it started.

This year’s theme is ‘Big Hair’. Well, my hair doesn’t do well with any kind of styling. Within moments it collapses to its standard public-schoolboy-fathered-by-a-monk look. However, there are other options here (steady), and it is an alternative that comprises the Big Comic Relief Sponsorship Event.

I have for the past two weeks been cultivating a Gandalf-like beard. And, I tell you, these things itch. I’m going to continue not shaving until Red Nose Day when I will dye this veritable hedgerow red, and parade myself in public. I will supply photographic proof of this, naturally.

But if you think I’m doing this to myself for free, you’re very much mistaken. No, you don’t even get to see the results thus far until I get £20. And I want…no, in fact I demand…that over £100 is raised by the day itself. This is the Way Things Will Be.
So:

£20 - photos of the current beard
£50 - weekly photographs of beard progress
£100 - dye is applied on Red Nose Day

Now I’m going to beg: Please, please, please sponsor me if you can. I don’t care how much; anything will help. Many people need help through no fault of their own, and anything you can spare will go straight to them. And you get to see me looking stupid with a beard. What more could you possibly desire So please. Please. You can sponsor me in various ways (in order of preference):

• Transfer directly into my bank account. Unfortunately I’ve been advised not to put my bank account details online. I don’t know which bright spark invented a system where it’s not a good idea to give people information you need to give them, but whatever. So please email me if you want to do it this way. I prefer this method as it’s quick and easy if you have internet banking, and there are no handling charges.
• NoChex payment link. NOCHEX allows you to sponsor me directly with any credit / debit card. It’s just like PayPal, and is as secure. It’s commonly used by UK eBay traders as their handling charges are lower than PayPal’s. If you like, you can add 2.6% + 20p to cover the charges, but I won’t hold it against you if you don’t!
• Email me and pledge - I’ll chase you for it

No problem if you want to remain anonymous, but to encourage others I humbly request that you leave a comment (there’s no need to register an account). You’re all truly wonderful people.

I’ll update the total at the top of this page as often as I can. Please help. Thank you.

Comic Relief is part of the Make Poverty History 2005 campaign, which is a joint venture by over 200 UK charities across the world. If you saw the second Vicar of Dibley christmas special you’ll have seen the white band campaign they’re running. I encourage all of you with websites to add the following to your pages, at least until Comic Relief is over:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/whiteband_small_left.js">
(can be customised by changing left to right, or small to big)

It hardly takes up any space, and can’t hurt to make more people aware. Thank you.

Whee, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for the last 1.5hrs, and it was bloody great. The only disadvantage was that my office is colder than a snowman’s freezer, if he lived on the far side of pluto. In the winter. At night. So I’m sitting here wrapped in my duvet
I was chatting to another night elf hunter, and it turned out that we were both working on the same quest, so we formed a team. He was level 9 and I was level 10, and we fought a few Gnarlpines for a while, hoping to get through to their boss, whom we had to kill. We found him after a while, and he turned out to be level 12. A challenge, but just about do-able.

We’d figured out that the best tactics were to take them on with arrows for as long as possible, then I move in at close quaters while my teammate backs off and keeps on with the arrows. So we pile into the boss. I used as many concussion shots as possible to slow him down, and we got him to about 33% health before he was too close. So I run up to him, he clouts me round the head and my health promptly drops to hardly anything.

Me: Argh!
My teammate: RUN!!!

So we turned and legged it, but failed. We both got hit, died, and had to travel back across country to find our bodies. By which time all the minions had respawned. We had another go, but this time Mr Boss Gnarlpine brought a minion with him, and we couldn’t take on two of them. So we died again. So now we have a problem in that we have to come back to life in the middle of about 8 Gnarlpines. We manage to respawn and get back to full strength by hiding behind a rock, at which point we see another person coming. Great! She was level 12, and I invited her to join our team, which she did.

So now there are three of us. Oh yes, we were confident this time. So we start fighting, and just as we come to the corner around which the boss resides, I run out of arrows.

Me: Damn, I’m out of arrows. I’ll have to go close combat.
Team-mate: You want some of mine?
Me: That’d be cool, thanks.

So a trade window pops up, but I hit the wrong button and escape from it. So we try again, and I manage to transfer the arrows over. Great. At this point we look up, and our new teammate has killed the boss! On her own! Because we’re a team, we got a load of experience points, as well as the quest completion we wanted. Still felt like something of a cheat, though.

I decided that was a good point to leave, so said my goodbyes and logged off. Then realised I hadn’t traded anything back for the arrows. So I’ll have to post him something tomorrow. Yep, there’s an in-game postal service! It even costs money to send larger parcels
Oh, and…Level 11. Oh yes.

Now I really must retire…night all!

I fancied trying to write a sonnet this evening. Don’t know what I’ll think in the morning, but here you go, straight from Notepad
And to the sound of drowning drums we sway
Three nights alive with oil and flame and lust
Our breaths in locked cathedrals handcuff play
Minor key of fate lost in twilight dust

Distant Mariachi block the sunrise
Chords vibrating beauteous denouement
Stanzas sink into grey, spin in their guise
Life’s worth of two transcribes a crawling font

Homesteads reaching and the concrete awaits
Tides stare backward and the hurricane swell
Dissolves to pristine brown, the cry abates
Age-old tales into heart’s quickening knell

But moments do linger, dreams too will ring
For wonder is brief, but memories sing

Hmmm, you know what I didn’t do today? I didn’t launch the Big Comic Relief Sponsorship Event. I’ll hopefully do it tomorrow.

Listening to REM’s ‘Electron Blue’ at the moment - heard it on the radio this morning and promptly downloaded it from iTunes. I think I’ll have to get the entire album. UPDATE: I just did. Must. Learn. To. Control. Wallet.

Not that it means anything, but today would have been my 4-year anniversary. I didn’t think about it that much though, which is a good sign, I think!

I woke up this morning with a piece of knowledge fixed in my mind that I feel I should pass on to you all:

If we decide to have a mass trip to New York, we musn’t invite Matthew Pinsent.

Couple of good things happened today, which offset the Businesswanker.

A most excellent friend sent me a lovely card which cheered me up no end.

I went dancing this evening, which was bloody good fun.

I was in the pharmacy earlier, and while waiting for the man to pour the pills from the big bottle into the little bottle I browsed the ‘alternative medicine’ shelf. Much amusement I found, yes I did. I liked the ’slimming patches’ developed after ‘years of advanced scientific research’ - they release a scent which stops you craving food, apparently. Also the IQ pills that ‘may help with brain power’.

I am intending to unveil my Big Comic Relief Sponsorship Event tomorrow, so be sure to tune in.

Rather a day of highs and low today. First, the low.

The Businesswanker issue came to a head this afternoon, when he turned up on the doorstep and wouldn’t go away. If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we don’t want to talk to him as he’s so very rude. He’s been asked to put everything in writing, but apparently isn’t of a mind to do so. He parked over the drive and was shouting and knocking and peering through windows. We told him (politely) to please leave, but he didn’t and wouldn’t. We informed him that we weren’t going to speak to him, but that didn’t help. He was standing in the porch getting louder and louder and more and more unpleasant. He also started phoning the office repeatedly.

To make things worse, we had somebody here who needed to leave, but understandably didn’t want to walk to their car with him around. So we called the police for advice, and they said it was unreasonable behaviour and that they’d send somebody over. Jane’s boyfriend arrived and got hassled by this guy too. I was glad he arrived, actually, as firstly he’s larger and more imposing than me, and secondly it was great to have someone not associated with the business around. I was shaking - it was a pretty nasty situation.

Eventually, and before the police arrived, he left. He kept ringing, though. The police knocked on the door a bit later and we explained everything. The officers agreed that he shouldn’t behave like that, and went around to his house. He’s been warned not to come around again, and told to put everything in writing.

So with a bit of luck, that’s put an end to that. Wasn’t a very nice experience, but at least it’s been sorted out.

And, I have to say, the police rock.

I can’t see how Internet Explorer 7 is in any way a bad thing. IE badly needs an update, as both Opera and Firefox way outclass it in terms of features. I’d like them to fix their CSS support most of all - it’s somewhat broken currently. Support for alpha-blending in .pngs would be great too, and if they were to add tabbed browsing, well…Once you’ve used it, you never want to go back!

With a bit of luck this’ll encourage competition, too. Not that IE’s going to catch Opera up any time soon, however. Having used it for a few weeks, I still highly recommend it. I started typing a little review just now, but I’d prefer to do a proper write-up when I have more time. Here’s a screenshot of my current setup:

I appear to have wandered down Sad Cul-de-Sac by mistake. I was doing fine on Jollity Avenue all day, but then somehow made a wrong turn. I’m trying to find my way back, but there are all these dead ends…Not sure how this happened. Shall try to talk Dad into watching a West Wing, I think - that always helps.

Happy Valentine’s Day one and all!

As I said yesterday, I sent a card. I joined ‘Operation Spread the Love’ - an inspired Joinee idea intended to make sure that every Joinee feels wanted Anyone who wanted to take part had to email their details, which were then matched up with an appropriate partner and addresses sent out. Unfortunately I didn’t receive anything Even Joinee volunteers didn’t want to send a card once they knew it was me, apparently. There’s still time for a van load of flowers, chocolates and bunnies to arrive, mind, so I’m not giving up hope just yet…If all else fails, though, online dating is apparently quite good.

Here’s a little poem for the singletons amongst us:

Lovers on the radio
send thoughts and dedications.
Friends are delivered roses
and hand-crafted red creations.

The tulips aren’t so pretty,
and chocolate tastes less sweet.
As you check the evening’s telly,
lonely lambs in fields do bleat.

(shut up, I’m making this up as I go)

Things may seem dull and grey today
and you feel bereft and clunky.
There’s no need, the world’s a happy place!
It has boomerangs and monkeys!

Today may not bring an angel,
but enjoy it all the same.
Treat yourself to some marshmellows;
find friends and play board games!

So have the bestest day today,
don’t sink in gloom or sorrow.
For we’re still young, the world still spins,
and there’s always tomorrow.

According to this article, Google have offered to host wikipedia! I really hope the wiki team accept, as the main problem with their site is the speed. I can see that they may not want to be attached to a particular company, but you have to host *somewhere*, and I doubt donations are enough to cover the costs of running their own server farm with leased line etc.

Google keep doing things that I consider rather cool. A couple of weeks back they introducted the ‘nofollow‘ HTML tag to deal with the problem of comment spam. It’s a property of an HTML link that causes Google not to follow the link during their indexing of the web, which means that the linked site won’t appear in search results so highly, so there’s much less incentive to do it in the first place. When you think about it, that’s a very brave move. Google’s entire business is based upon their search results being the best, and to introduce something that deliberately breaks that is ballsy.

My only niggle with Google is that they don’t like Opera very much. Both Gmail and Google Maps use non-standard code (introduced by IE). Firefox supports this, but Opera have always stuck by their conform-perfectly-to-the-standards motto and are having to play catchup. Gmail support is just about there, but the maps don’t work at all.

Bill Watterson appears to know me, and to have usurped my personality for his comic strip. It’s the only explanation.

Last weekend I was evangelising as to the superiority of the metric system over imperial. I do this a lot. While explaining how celcius is much more reasonable than fahrenheit I was met with the response that ‘fahrenheit is more accurate because there are more degrees per celcius degree’. Interesting. This bothered me. I mean, obviously you can just go down to decimal places, but I didn’t like there being a comeback that I couldn’t immediately respond to. So this evening I looked up fahrenheit, as I realised I knew next to nothing about it (why was I evangelising about something I don’t know much about? Shut up). Turns out that fahrenheit as a scale is completely nuts.

Paraphrasing the wikipedia entry: Physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit took the temperature at which an equal mixture of ice and salt melts, as well as the temperature of blood, and developed a scale between the two with twelve subdividisions. He then split each subdivision into eight, so that the two fixed points of the scale were at 0 and 96. It was later observed that plain water froze at 32 degrees and boiled at 212 degrees. He turned out to have messed up, however, and after he died the entire scale was recalibrated so that water really did freeze at 32 and boil at 212. So the temperature of blood, ie. the human body temperature, changed at this point.

So that’s pretty weird. Centigrade and celcius (which are actually the teeniest bit offset due to their differing definitions - although sources will disagree on this point) make far more sense. At the risk of being patronising, they’re better because they use units of ten and have the triple point of water at 0 and its boiling point at 100 (sorry, I just wanted to be thorough). How would one further subdivide up the fahrenheit scale? Admittedly it’s arbitrary, but there’s no obvious way to do it. Should it be broken up into twelfths? Eighths? I go nuts when I see something like “5.8 inches” - that’s basically saying ‘yes, units of ten make more sense for things we don’t know, but above that it’s perfectly reasonable to use 12/16/8/13/whatever we feel like!’. So how are you going to avoid this bizarre result with the fahrenheit scale? You’re not.

So I think that in terms of consistency, ease-of-use and logic, the celcius scale is in fact more accurate than fahrenheit as it can be subdivided in a way that makes sense. It has to be said, though, that while celcius is great, Kelvin’s the best

Down to Earth is on in the lounge, and I had to escape. I just had to. I can’t cope with that programme.

Somehow it’s sunday evening again. Anyone know how that happened? Me either.

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow! I did send a card, and I will receive a card, but it’s not like you think; I’ll explain tomorrow. This is the first time in many years that I haven’t sent a card properly. Am not moping - for some reason I’m not at all worried about tomorrow - that’s just a comment
I’ve been meaning to write about a few things for ages. I noticed last week that google’s word definition links no longer point you to dictionary.com, but rather answers.com. As it turns out it’s a very cool site. Type anything into their search box and they quickly return results from the major online dictionaries, wikipedia, online who’s whos, book lists, links to other articles in which the term is mentioned and links to google searches, all neatly organised and easy to read. I’ve added a search box to Opera and find I’m using it more than Google! That’s mainly because my searches are generally for specific things rather than more standard search terms. If I want to know which song has ‘how about extra large’ in the lyrics then Google is obviously the best bet, but if I want to find out information about The Barefoot Man himself, then I’d probably try answers.com first. It’s coming in very handy for physics and maths topics. It’s worth a look, I think.

I spent much of today playing World of Warcraft. And much fun was had. On the right you can see Elmlenamor, my Night Elf. He’s cool. He has odd dress sense, granted, but he’s cool. He is a hunter. He has a bow. He has a dagger. He can hide in the shadows. He is what I would be like were I a an elf and stuck inside a computer game.

I’ve only been playing for a few hours, but World of Watcraft has impressed me so far. Things that I like:

• It loads quickly. Really quickly. You double-click the icon and you’re into the login screen. Half-Life 2 is great, but I don’t ever think “I’ll have a quick play of HL2″ because it takes forever to start up.
• The introductory cinematic was very dramatic.
• The music is non-repetitive and actually quite good.
• The patches come via peer-to-peer, so that their server doesn’t get overloaded.
• The game seems to have a real depth. There really is a huge amount that you can do, be it questing, trading, gaining skills, exploring, fighting…The thing that turned me off City of Heroes eventually was that it was entirely based around combat, and I just got bored after a couple of months. I can’t say that won’t happen with this, but there does at the moment seem to be enough content that you can decide to go off and do something else without it mattering.
• The quests are interesting - granted, they don’t stray from the standard kill / collect / visit formula, but that’s understandable (what else is there, really?). For example I had to rush around finding herbs so that a man injured fighting spiders could be healed. Then there was a time limit during which I had to get the resulting potion into his hands. It felt exciting
• You can only see chat messages from people in your local area, which cuts down on the puerile spam somewhat!
• Although grouping is encouraged and has advantages, there’s no need if you don’t want to (the manual says, anyway). CoH got to the stage where you couldn’t complete most of the missions without a group, no matter what level you were.
• If you die you don’t lose experience. While I can see how that makes sense, in CoH I ended up going backwards, which was infuriating. Upon death you are resurrected as a spirit at a nearby graveyard and have to spend a few minutes travelling across country to get back to your body. So it’s annoying enough so you want to avoid it, but doesn’t actually spoil the gameplay.

Do let me know if I start using bullet points too much, won’t you.

Oh, and the Big Leafy Man I’m in front of is in fact a city guardian, so I didn’t have to fight him. Not that it would have lasted very long.