You believe this?

How could they…? They really…? DO THEY NOT HAVE BRAINS!?

Note also the misspelling of ‘Sponging‘.

Some songs I’ve been listening to a fair bit recently…

• Run - Snow Patrol
• Somewhere Else - Razorlight
• Electricity - Elton John
• Fix You - Coldplay
• Wander Lust - R.E.M.
• City of Blinding Lights - U2
• Demons - Brian McFadden
• I Do - Rob Costlow
• White Shadows - Coldplay
• Bliss - Rob Costlow
• Don’t Think of Me - Dido

About half are singles, but taken from albums I own. Funny how you can suddenly start to appreciate album tracks once they get some radio play.

Thanks to the people who left me audio comments the other day. I got a couple from people I know, and one ‘hello!’ from somebody I didn’t. Which was cool. I’ve put up my Skype details on the right now. This is risky, but I’ll see how it goes…The graphic was created using the Brilliant Button Maker.

Speaking of graphics, I’m just trying out Paint Shop Pro 9. I used to use PSP years ago, then moved onto a, ummm, dubious copy of Photoshop 5. I grew a conscience soon after and after using Photoshop LE for a bit switched to Photoshop Elements 2, which I’ve been using for a few years now. It’s slow and clunky and lacks many of the useful tools, so I figured I’d play with PSP. First impressions are ok.

• Blood substitute - "The product the chemists have developed is compatible with all blood groups, is stable for several months at room temperature and remains completely sterile." It can apparently be used in transfusions.
• Crackpot index - "A simple method for rating revolutionary contributions to physics [or science generally]"
• BBC NEWS | Blink and you really do ‘miss it’ - Certain brain regions actually switch off during blinking, apparently.
• BBC NEWS | ‘Don’t panic’ over jellyfish - "You don’t stop your kids playing outside just because they get stung by a nettle or a bee or a wasp, so why keep them away from the beach?". Ok, he has a point.
• Google’s new customizable home page - Newly-upgraded, with the ability to add your own feeds.
• Think Better with Chewing Gum? - "Studies indicate that, for both kids and adults, mental tasks are completed up to 20% more effectively when we chew gum". Cool.
• Download of the Day: CCleaner - I cleaned out 850mb in about three minutes. I never knew there was so much crap…(quiet, Ben)
• Cerberus Blog - An Unavoidable Tragedy? - A surveillance officer discusses the shooting last Friday.
• New Superman Logo - The official Superman logo for the new film.
• Tricks of the Trade: Painter - How to prevent a ’skin’ forming on opened paint cans. Worth a try.
• Playing on Your IPod - Interactive text-based games for the iPod. It’d be great to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide text game ported.
• Zero-Waste in Seattle - Wouldn’t that be something if it actually happened.
• How To Do Decentralized Energy - An interesting idea, albeit rather controversial!

He gets it. He really gets it. When half the media and most of the intellectual left are doing their best to sympathise with suicide bombers, the Prime Minister is taking a stand I consider to be entirely correct. Like he says, democracy isn’t ‘Western’, it’s human. Bend over backwards to understand other viewpoints, sure, but it’s perfectly ok to decide that they’re entirely wrong. That the people you disagree with are of a different culture is of no consequence. Logic and morality have no boundaries. Sorry to be preachy, but the alternative viewpoint is way too close to cultural relativism for me to keep my mouth shut. It’s a condition

1000 posts! In 22 months, that’s just under two posts per day. Not bad.

I wish I had an exciting announcement to make. Really I do. I considered a re-design, but I’m actually quite happy with the website at the moment. A couple of bugs need fixing, most notably the category links, but other than that it’s going well. I’m also not moving to Australia, gay, or pregnant. In lieu of anything terribly exciting…metablogging!

Would it be wanky of me to go through the most popular posts? I’m going to do it anyway. Comment-wise Stepping Backwards, regarding an apparently common display problem, holds the crown; then there’s Data Protection Agency Services, an early post warning about a scam letter that a good number of people are taken in by; and finally The Face of Local Politics, in which we were visited by a Famous Person. Views-wise, I’ve only been collecting stats for a few months so can’t supply anything very useful. Google Earth is currently way in the lead, though. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, gets regular traffic too.

1000 posts comes at an interesting time. A year ago this Friday was the worst day of my life so far. It completely wrecked me for a long time, and I don’t pretend to know whether I’m over it yet. Blogging has helped - even if nobody had been reading, it still felt good to say it. Since then many good things have happened, as well some unpleasant ones. I went to America, started dancing, grew a beard, shaved the beard (few noticed), and by pure chance came across somebody rather lovely. The website got a major redesign; I discovered flickr, the power of RSS and podcasting; I Joined, evangelised, flew, was published and spent more time than is healthy looking at penguins. It’s been a busy 12 months!

So what am I going to do now? I’m going to get serious about writing, at least until christmas. It’s always been there in the back of my mind, and nothing compares to the satisfaction I get from it. I can afford to support myself for a while, and if there’s ever an opportunity to really go for it, now’s the time. So I will.

Before christmas, though, I fancy a holiday. Probably in August, after my A-level results come in. I was looking at New York, but it could be a little pricey to stay for a week. Anybody have any cunning tips / suggestions / tickets?

Woohoo! Finally we’re back into space.

Quote from lunchtime news (slightly paraphrased):

On this photograph from a white-water rafting centre you can see [name of guy]. On 7th July this man blew himself up on a London tube train. It seems no-one at the centre knew of his terrible plans.

Oh, you think?

I tried out Konfabulator a few months back, and it was fun. It allows the creation of MacOS X-like ‘widgets’ on the desktop, which anybody can design. I had an RSS feed, eBay watcher, gmail checker (that never worked, actually), happy smiley-faced clock, weather info…that kind of thing. It had a certain charm, but I didn’t see that it was worth $20 for my usage so uninstalled once the trial period ran out. Last weekend Yahoo bought the company, and they’re releasing it for free. What’s particularly good about this is that the number of available widgets should increase dramatically with all the new customers, and hopefully the innovation in mac circles will spread over to us PC users.

MSN Virtual Earth quietly went live yesterday, with the big announcements due today. It’s very Google Maps-like in terms of easy scrolling and zooming, except that it scales to the browser window. There are a number of interesting features such as ‘locate me’, which attempts to determine your location from wi-fi signals or IP address, as well as more keyboard shortcuts. There’s very little UK info at the moment, and both my postcode and ’solihull’ turn up nothing in the searches, so I’ll likely stick with Google for the moment.

Ooh, what else is there…

I’m spending increasing amounts of time browsing flickr groups. There are so many wonderful photographs out there! The Light Fantastic, Maimed Photographer, I am… and the spectacular Catchy Colors (39k photos!) have all caught my eye recently.

Lunch time!

The Conservative party are being told to adopt the ‘faith, flag and family’ approach so successful for the Republicans in the US. Hmmm, just when I thought I couldn’t get any less likely to vote tory…Blunt roundup of my political leanings: faith = backwards, illogical and dangerous; flag = pointless patriotism that’s rarely for the greater good; family values = prudish selfishness that often seems to descend into nonsense.

I’m sure that didn’t annoy anybody.

Talk Politics and (perhaps) Bloggers4Labour have come out strongly against the ‘pro-war left’. It must be a little daunting for them given that most UK political websites are very much of the ‘pro-war left’, so good on them for making a stand. I personally think their argument is attacking a large straw man, but I’m not enough of a political junkie to produce an effective counter. Hopefully Harry, Popinjays or norm will write something in response.

• Meaning of ‘moment of zen’? | Ask MetaFilter - The normally excellent Ask Metafilter goes crazy. Reminds me of The Greater Internet F**kwad Theory.
• Microsoft post RAW thumbnailer and viewer - View Canon RAW files natively in Windows Explorer and preview - cool!
• Viewport USB to VGA adapter - I wonder whether you could plug it into a wireless USB transmitter?
• Hitachi

Did anybody else watch “Secrets of the Sexes” on BBC1 this evening? Urgh, I’m yet again embarrassed to be male. The premise was a ’scientific dating agency’, which matched people using facial characteristics, compatibility tests and various psychological profiles. It was a pretty interesting idea. They gathered 20 men and 20 women for a speed-dating session, making predictions as to who would find who most attractive.

Various subjects were interviewed beforehand as to what they wanted in a perfect match. The number of men who specifically stated they wanted somebody who could cook and clean…it was pathetic! They also put the men in front of a software program to design their ideal partner’s body shape. About half were realistic, but there were a fair number with anatomically impossible shapes, particularly in the breast area. Lara Croft + a good few cup sizes, with a teeny tiny waist, was popular. The ‘average’ build from the 20 men wasn’t as ridiculous, thankfully, with a 32C/D chest size. The most important result was a confirmation of other studies which found the waist:hips ratio to be the most important characteristic. It’s been proven that women with smaller waists and wider hips have a higher fertility rate, so evolutionarily speaking this trait of the male psyche makes perfect sense. In today’s society it of course makes no real difference, but it’s interesting to have it explained.

The biggest wankers of the show, though, were members of the “London Seduction Society”. Geez. These guys meet up to discuss the best ways to seduce women, and have talks and lectures on various techniques. As if this isn’t seedy enough, their behaviour was bloody appalling! Anna of little red boat wrote about similar guys recently, and it’s something I wasn’t really aware of. They basically criticise the women in order to make them grateful somebody is taking an interest. They’ll ask why the women are still single and suggest reasons why - one guy even said “so you couldn’t entertain me, then?” - and generally be terribly full of themselves. Ugh. After meeting everybody, each person wrote down those they’d been attracted to. It was extremely funny when two of the three society members had no women interested, while the other guy had one. Most of the nicer blokes were chosen by two or three women, so this was at least a vindication of my particular views on how to treat people.

The predictions failed almost completely. Particularly interesting was that while married couples tend to have similar faces, none of the similarly-faced couples selected each other. Odd. The scientists, in true scientific-method fashion, said that they’d work on more hypotheses. It was nice that the show didn’t feel the need to take the mickey at this point; it approached the whole thing as the experiment it was, rather than a ground-breaking discovery that failed. I’m not sure how scientific an approach it really was - 20 couples isn’t really a large enough number, I’d say - but it was an interesting show nonetheless.

I’ve not really spent any time in pubs / clubs / anywhere that people flirt generally, so watching these people talk and try to attract each other was something of an eye-opener. I’m not sure I’d be able to do it! It just seemed so false. I think I’ve watched too many romantic comedies - I just want my very own Sleepless in Seattle

Just watching the newly-moved Top of the Pops…and Jeremy Clarkson is presenting alongside Fern Thingy. Jeremy Clarkson? Oh ok, Tony Christie’s now performing his new single. I think I get it

• Microsoft goes arty with tablet caricatures - Leicester Square street artist who draws your picture on a tablet PC and emails it using a wifi connection. How cool! Via Scoble via others.
• Google Maps Hybrid Mode - Google Maps can now overlay streets onto satellite photos much like Google Earth. Via [H]ardOCP
• BBC NEWS | ‘Evil’ Harry Potter day cancelled - A Lincolnshire school was forced to cancel its Harry Potter day after parents and a rector complained it would "lead our children into areas of evil". ARGH. I think I know who’s leading the kids into madness, and it isn’t Harry.
• BBC NEWS | Killer caterpillar stalks snails - It really does
• Into The Net In 1995 - "Everything you need to know about the Internet" from 1995. I like how they skirt the issue of finding relevant information. How did we cope without Google?
• Flickr: Word on the Street - A flickr group full of absolutely wonderful little messages scrawled on streets, buildings, posters…Some aren’t that nice, but many are quite touching
• Microsoft Windows Vista - The new name for Longhorn. Not bad, actually…I quite like it.

I received a letter from the University of Central England yesterday. Dear Mr West, it said…

I am delighted to invite you to a very special event taking place at the conservatoire next week. Steinway & Sons and the Birmingham Conservatoire have developed a special alliance to provide you with a remarkable opporunity to acquire a Steinway, Boston or Essex piano at a substantially reduced price.

How on Earth did I get onto this particular mailing list? I looked up the ’standard’ price of new Steinways, and they’re between ten and fifteen thousand pounds. Much as I’d like a lovely piano, I don’t have that kind of spare cash, even with a ’substantially reduced price’. Nice to be asked, though!