Also somewhat Yoda-like. Utter genius. Link via Ben Hammersley.

I’m slightly confused about Bloglines. Some of my feeds are working fine, but others aren’t at all. I first noticed that it hadn’t picked up on either Nod or Lil’s posts from this morning, which was odd given that Opera had found them no problem. I figured maybe there was a LiveJournal issue, but then spotted that my BBC News feed wasn’t working either. There are a fair few that don’t seem to be getting any information, but do work as I can view previous entries. I’ve double-checked the feed addresses so I don’t think that’s the problem. Maybe they happen to be having problems at the moment…or I could have made a mistake somewhere. Hmmm.

What’s black and white and gushes? The catholic church.

Sorry. But really, he’s 78. How much longer is he going to last? And don’t fall off your chair, people, but apparently he’s rather conservative. The Pope. A conservative. Who’d. Have. Thought. Did I mention that he used to be a member of the Hitler youth? Boingboing also points out that he was “prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition”. Galileo may be back in the dog house.

Little irony here, when the crowds didn’t know what colour the conclave smoke was. Hmmm - the church’s message is meant to be black and white, but in the real world it’s just shades of grey. Imagine that.

I realise I haven’t been updating you on the progress of Mandrake, the seven-legged spider. This must have caused much distress, and for that I apologise. There is much to update, after all. Mandrake has had an exciting week. You may recall that I first spotted him on Friday as he sat on my bathroom door looking scared. Over the course of the day he moved closer and closer toward the door handle and observed, with much hilarity, Andrew’s double-take every damn time said wuss exited the room. On Saturday morning he was still in this position, and I was starting to wonder whether he actually needed food / water at some point. I mean, you’d think he would, really. But then, how long do spiders live?

Anyway, this all became moot when, during the course of Saturday afternoon, AN AMAZING TRANSFORMATION OCCURRED. For the next time I observed Mandrake I did not see him. I saw two spiders. Two. One much larger than Mandrake. I was immediately very sad, for it appeared that Mandrake had been guzzled by some passing fascist spider with no respect for spider lack-of-cannibalism etiquette. Then, though, I took a closer look. And I found that what had appeared to be the mangled corpse of Mandrake was in fact a cuticula. Ecdysis had taken place and Mandrake had shed his exoskeleton. On my bathroom door. How marvellous. The skin is still visibly that of a spider, too. Ecdysis, according to wikipedia, is characterised by a period of inactivity, which explains why he was slowly wandering around my door for a couple of days. It was nothing to do with his lack of appendage!

But that’s not all.

Examination of Mandrake’s new form revealed a very tiny little leg where you’d expect to find the missing limb. It appears to be slightly deformed rather than eaten, or similar. Mandrake’s obviously proud of his new body, because he’s currently doing laps of the room. I keep looking for him, thinking that he’ll have disappeared, when I spot him above the shower or underneath the window. He’s been progressing for the last few days and has nearly made it back to the door.

What a clever Mandrake. I’ll keep you updated.

Extrapolating wildly, the music download poll has revealed that a full 50% of the population do not download music online. 40% use iTunes, while only 10% use the once-great Napster. So I don’t know what the record industry is worried about.

New poll is regarding feeds. Do you use them? If so, how?

I’ve altered the site’s RSS feed a fair bit this evening, so please let me know if you notice any problems. The feed now goes via FeedBurner, which has a fair few advantages including more information in the feed as well as letting me see stats on readers. The old feed link should still work fine, so you needn’t change anything. I’ve added a more visible XML link to the banner, as well as a bloglines subscribe button. For the moment I’ve removed the Make Poverty History banner and replaced it with a (not as good as it looked in photoshop) button, as the banner was blocking any links underneath it. I’m hoping to find a way around that, though, as I rather liked it.

I use Opera to manage my feeds currently, but I’ve heard good things about bloglines. Today I finally got around to setting up an account and I’m quite impressed so far. There was nothing wrong with Opera’s implementation, but a web-based system would be easier to manage generally. Particularly when transferring settings around etc. Bloglines is currently handling my 80+ feeds with aplomb and I may well move over to it. I particularly like that it’s really fast. They also have a notification utility that sits in the taskbar, but it’s…well…not terribly useful. I was hoping it would say which feeds have been updated, but it doesn’t. Maybe there’s a way to set that - I haven’t really played around with it much.

See, I’m slowly catching up with the services everyone else was using years ago Gotta learn about this new-fangled intarweb thingy.

Yahoo purchased flickr last month, and today the flickrblog has news of the first benefits from this deal. It’s very cool, actually. Standard users have double the capacity and bandwidth - 200 photos and 20mb/month respectively. Anybody who, like me, purchased a pro account before yesterday gets a similar doubling of bandwidth up to 2gb / month. They also get a free year’s extension on their account as well as two free pro accounts to give to anybody they wish. Very interesting and much appreciated - thanks, flickr!

Google Maps and Google Local today launched in the UK. I’m happy to say it works just as well as the USA one, with a local search for ‘pizza’ finding all the local procurers of said delicacy as well as pinpointing them on the map. Google SMS is apparently also working in the UK, so if you’re standing in York you can text ‘york.coffee’ to 64664 (6GOOG), and receive locations for the nearest Starbucks etc. That could come in really handy! UPDATE: The wallet-sized tip sheet is probably worth printing off, too.

Just *finally* fixed a problem with this site’s layout. The footer should now actually appear at the bottom of the page for firefox users, rather than coming straight after the last post and resting alongside the blogroll. That was so very annoying. I figured it was a firefox CSS quirk, given that IE6 and Opera rendered it fine. However Opera 8 Final, which was quietly released onto FTP servers this morning, showed the same problem. As ever, it turned out to be a silly mistake by me and was to do with nested divs. To be honest there’s no way that IE6 should have rendered it the way it did! Still, it’s working now. Tweaked a couple of other things since I was messing about anyway. It’ll validate again, too.

Bit better today, although pretty lonely. That always happens after seeing Kate, though, and normally fades after a day or two. I did manage to get a lot of things done that have been outstanding for a while, so that’s good. I’ll upload a picture of my newly reorganised desk tomorrow, and you may want to prepare yourselves for a shock: there’s actually wood under there.

I really have to knuckle down to studying, starting tomorrow. Because the maths has been increasingly difficult recently, I’ve been getting disillusioned and taking every opportunity I can not to work. Which is dumb. I’ve been trying to kick myself back into gear, and a fair few things have come to a natural end over the last week or two, so I’m going to grab the opportunity. If I don’t really try then the period of self-loathing I went through after my first a-level results will be nothing in comparison (and those of you who remember that will appreciate my reasoning ). So it’s going to be six hours solid working per day, until the exams are over. I’ll still be blogging in the evening etc., but there’ll be less from me for a few months.

Just off to watch the final episode of 24, series 3. I’ve had at least three close calls at seeing clips from series 4 over the past week, and I don’t want that as I need only see a face to know who lives and who dies in s3.

Probably shouldn’t be writing this now, but, well, I am. We went out for Rachel’s birthday this evening, and Kate was there. I’ve been doing well for a while now in that regard - I only miss her when I’m excessively tired or hungry and have been getting on fine recently. Seeing her is a different matter, though, and when she’s laughing and joking it’s just bloody awful. I was thinking it might be ok tonight as it’s been a while since I’ve seen her, but it wasn’t. The best way I can deal with it is to generally ignore her, rude as that sounds. Well, not totally ignore, but only exchange pleasantries when necessary. The problem, quite frankly, isn’t that I’d get upset talking to her again, or that I want to get back together - she’s just so different now from how she used to be - it’s that I’d still enjoy talking to her, which is so much worse later on. So I would probably have come home tonight wishing the world would end, but Ben, Lynsey and Hel came back to mine to play games and I had a really good time and I’m feeling much better. So many thanks to them.

Tried to find an A4 whiteboard for Sully today. Failed. Must try harder.

Oh, and I want one of these.

Nod^2

Where’s my phone charger? Where is it? I was just halfway through a reply to a text message when the phone died, and now I can’t revive it and I’m going to seem very rude. It lives in only three places in the house, and it’s in none of them. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. This is annoying me more than it should. Anybody want to come round and help me look? Any ladies? Oh dear, I’ve descended from seemingly useless to slightly creepy in the space of one sentence. I’m off to start turning the house upside down now. Shouldn’t be too hard, because I have muscles of steel. Argh, I’ve done it again. I can’t help my natural charm.

Ooh, I forgot to say that there was a seven legged spider in my bathroom this morning. Is that possible? Nah, one leg must have been eaten, or otherwise disposed of…I think. I’m not an arachnologist, though. I just made that word up just now. Wonder if it exists. Apparently not.

A few months back I signed up for the government ITsafe alerts, which are:

designed to provide both home users and small businesses with accurate, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack

Not a bad idea. An email just letting people know how to deal with the latest viruses etc. sounds logical, to me. The system involves setting up a code word that is included in the email so that you can ensure it’s legitimate. Again, not a bad idea. However, an alert arrived this week that had the ‘code word’ included in the subject line. I’m not an expert, but isn’t there a big security issue with subject lines? I don’t know whether they’re easy to read by any passing packet sniffer, or appear in server logs or something, but I remember there being a big fuss when some large company accidentally included people’s passwords in the subject lines a couple of years back. Can anybody enlighten me?

Had an interesting political discussion earlier. It’s fascinating to see the varied opinions even within a small group of friends. I’m surprised we didn’t get all out war when somebody made the innocuous comment: “I’m guessing everybody here would vote Labour?” I’m going to
I put some new ebay items up earlier today. Hopefully I’ll have a little more luck than last time. I’ve added gallery images and set a lower starting price. The gallery images cost an extra 15p, but I’ll stretch to that.

Anybody see CSI: Miami yesterday? The final advert break contained a preview of the following programme, which was footage of a penis-extension operation. They showed a full-on clip of the procedure. I don’t object or anything, but that’s a fairly brave thing to do in a preview. I guess that anybody watching CSI: Miami will be used to graphic scenes, but there’ll undoubtedly be complaints.

Things I’d like to talk about but haven’t gotten around to:

• The BBC today launched their Creative Archive license, which is quite stunningly cool. I’m not really sure where the world’s heading at the moment, what with copyright laws becoming tighter and tighter while information is becoming increasingly free.
• I was very entertained by this MP (oop, can’t say that any more - how about ‘wanabee MP’) who criticised new speed cameras on the M4. Long-time readers will know that I buck the general opinion of these devices, and it was great to see him get totally smacked down by logic.
• You can create your own Conservative Party poster here, with your chosen phrase in handwritten letters over the ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ tagline. I just left it blank. There are some not very polite real-life poster alterations here.
• This site attempts to end ‘Beg the Question’ abuse. Good luck with that.
• This is supposed to be the world’s ugliest car. I think it’s cool. I want one. Ben disagrees.
• And finally, the random computer science research paper generator just has to be seen to be believed. Its mimicry is really quite scary. The creators have managed to get a paper accepted at a conference, and fully intend “to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face.” Brilliant.

About half of those links came directly from Boing Boing, btw. Ho hum. Getting tired now. Had something of a restless night yesterday so I’d best be off. Night!