The hardest tongue-twister I’ve tried in quite a while:

I wish to wash my Irish wristwatch

I’ve finally got it, but the final two words caught me out for ages.

Pictures from the dancing weekend are finally all up on flickr. That’s taken my Flickr uploaded shots to over 1000 since last Feb!

Feeling much better today, happily Haven’t done much, though.

I’m altogether fed up with my website going down all the time. I’m registered with a service that tries to download a text file every minute or so and emails me if the server doesn’t respond for a length of time. Over the last few weeks this has been happening anywhere between four and fifteen times per day, for anything up to twenty minutes. Various people have commented on my website being down recently, I contacted my hosts - IXWebhosting - and they deny any problems. My hosting is up for renewal in a couple of weeks, so I’m going to be moving providers (again), this time to the very highly-regarded Textdrive. It’s a little more expensive than before, but I think it’s worth it to get decent service. I’m hoping it’ll be faster, too. I’ve transferred ballisticduck.co.uk to their servers today, and once I’ve figured out how their system works I’ll move the whole blog over. That’s no small job, so I’ll work myself up to it.

Played around with the blog this afternoon: just tidying up a few things. The poll should now work properly, and no longer requires a page refresh. The times on the front page are now displayed slightly differently, and the archive pages now display related posts and a smaller tag cloud. Nothing very exciting. The webcam software was causing my computer to spontaneously restart, weirdly, so that’s still disabled while I try to figure out the problem.

Introspection alert. Feel free to skip.

I’m not feeling so hot at the moment. I was half way around today’s walk when I abruptly ran out of energy, and it was a struggle to get home. I’m a little shaky and am shivering sometimes, too. The thing is that I don’t feel ill at all. It’s been one of the worst days emotionally for a long time, and though I’ve been trying to snap out of it things have just got worse. I can’t put it down to anything in particular, but I’ve been on the verge of tears more than once, and have been feeling really down generally.

I’m just weird. I used to do magic shows in front of my entire junior school and secondary school year group, and later there were children’s parties. I’ll happily talk in front of large crowds, witter on about my feelings on a website available to anybody with an internet connection, or make a fool of myself before complete strangers, but ask me to sit and chat with a group of people I don’t know and I’ll be scared for days beforehand. I think I’m getting better, but this last weekend really pushed me as far as I could go. I enjoyed some points very much, but others were a struggle. I far preferred to be on the dance floor than sitting at the side, and when I got back to my room had to actively calm myself down on a few occasions. I went through stages of being happy, then depressed and convinced everybody must hate me, then inexplicably lonely. The life coaching has helped a lot - before I definitely wouldn’t have lasted for an entire evening without finding an excuse to leave - and Lynsey being there helped very much too, but bloody hell.

So I don’t know whether the weekend is just taking its toll or if I’m sickening for something, but I hope it gets better soon.

This amuses me.

Just looking through web-guru Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Design Mistakes for Weblogs. I don’t do very well

1. No Author Biographies
   I’m ok here: the in-need-of-revamping About Me page covers that
2. No Author Photo
   Really? That’s a problem? I’ve added one to the bio page - there’s no need to put it in plain sight
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
   Ho hum. Quite often they only make sense to me.
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
   Well, yes. I do that too. I should probably work on that.
5. Classic Hits are Buried
   I.e. the best posts aren’t easily accessible. I have the tagging options, but I guess this could be better.
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
   Again there’s the tagging, but it does need improving.
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
   Heh. Think I’m ok on this one.
8. Mixing Topics
   Bit of a dodgy one if you ask me. I have no problem with mixing topics as I like the conversational style, although will separate anything that takes more than a paragraph to say. Ish. Sometimes.
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
   I really don’t care. Maybe I should, but I don’t.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
    Oh, bollocks. This seems like pure snobbery to me. The argument is that other people control your website, but that only applies if they do anything that bothers you. Blogspot has no pop-up ads or other annoyances currently. If you’re hosting with them and ads are introduced, you can leave if that’s not what you want. This reminds me of the people I’ve heard complaining about the newly-resized Guardian because ‘they can’t take it seriously’ - I’d suggest judging websites by their content rather than the domain name.

Got back at midday yesterday, and have spent the time since trying to get my computer up and running properly. Early last month I installed a Maxtor SATA hard drive, and had some problems. Sometimes the computer wouldn’t get past the bios loading screen, other times Windows wouldn’t start…it was annoying. Some hard work by Ed revealed the problem to be an incompatibility between the Maxtor drive and the motherboard. Maxtor blame the mobo manufacturers, but there’s no fix other than a bios upgrade, which never materialised. I’d removed the Maxtor and switched to a spare IDE drive, and last week finally decided to sort things out. I grabbed an external firewire enclosure for the Maxtor and a compatible Seagata SATA drive. The Maxtor’s now happily sitting in a glowy blue box on top of the computer and the Seagate is plugged in and working.

The problem is that I’m having major problems copying my data across to the new drive. Normally swapping a hard drive is very simple process: boot into BartPE, copy the data over to the new drive, unplug the old, and you’re done. Windows will not boot properly on the new drive, however - it logs me off immediately after ‘loading personal settings’ and gets stuck in a logon/logoff cycle¹. I can’t find anybody with this exact problem, but I’m guessing it’s to do with SATA drivers and XP having a strop. I could reinstall XP on the new drive, but I’d really rather not. Back in the day reinstalling Windows was a fun job - everything worked so much better afterwards - but with XP not needing the same six-monthly clearouts as 9x, it’s just a chore. I now have so many programs and happy little settings that it takes weeks to get things back the way I want them. I’m at a loss as to how to solve this as XP should be able to cope providing the SATA drivers are installed pre-transfer. I’m currently trying a drive imaging program, on the off chance that simply copying the files over isn’t sufficient².

Once things get back to normal, and Windows relaxes from being confined to a bursting-at-the-seems 80gb drive, I’ll start work on all the photos from the weekend.

UPDATE: Got it. Phew. Acronis True Image 9 imaged the drive, and it all works fine! I don’t know whether it messed around with drivers (seems unlikely) or if the ‘configuring drive letters’ message was the fix I needed, but I’m just glad it’s all sorted. Sure, I could try to figure it out, but quite frankly I can’t be bothered…True Image has a demo that’s fully functional for 15 days. I was tempted to leave it, but it wouldn’t be fair to use the software for free, so I picked up a copy - I’m sure it’ll come in useful in the future!

1. playing the associated sounds repeatedly, which gets old real quick [↩]
2. a bit of a dodgy premise, I admit [↩]

Lynsey and I are in St. Annes, just near Blackpool, for a dancing weekend. Our hotel is right on the beach and we’re trying to find the sea, which seems to have retreated to the US east coast. Bit nervous about socialising with the rest of the dance group, but am determined to try. No signal in the hotel so blogging may be light - have a fun weekend!

MGM: Today we will announce the new James Bond at a press conference in London. The speculation will finally be over!

Daniel Craig’s mother: We’re thrilled to bits.

Some spy.

• inquisitor ~ instant search - An instant search AJAX application
• Richard Dawkins: Frequently Asked Questions - Interesting as ever, but check out the final section
• [ws] Color Scheme Generator 2 - Useful in choosing colour combinations for websites

Via Boing Boing, a letter from George W. Bush to Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, written in 1997:

Dear Harriet

Thank you for the card and a happy 52nd to you. I appreciate your friendship and candor- never hold back your sage advice-

All my best
George W.

P.S. No more public scatology

I didn’t know what scatology meant, so looked it up:

Scatology, or coprology, in medicine, biology and paleontology, is the study of feces.

In psychology, a scatology is an obsession with excretion or excrement, or the study of such obsessions. (See also coprophilia).

In literature, “scatological” commonly describes indecent works that make particular reference to excretion or excrement, as well as to toilet humour.

So now I’m really intrigued Jon, please enlighten us!

This evening’s Question Time was revealing, I thought. Tory leadership contender David Cameron was one of the panelists, and he came over very well indeed. At one point he said that he doesn’t believe people should compromise their values, and that if he agreed with a Labour policy he’d say so. I don’t know whether this is a standard line from leadership contenders, but it didn’t get a great reaction from the crowd or the other (non-MP) panellists, so I’d guess not. Throughout the show I thought he spoke clearly and put his arguments very well. That I happen to think his values are deeply flawed is irrelevant - I entirely agree that MPs should stand up for what they believe in, regardless of partisan point-scoring opportunities. I’m aware that everybody does, but for a leadership hopeful to actually state his agreement with some Labour policies during his campaign takes some guts.

Indeed, tonight’s discussions between David Cameron, Labour environment minister Ben Bradshaw, and Lib Dem Mark Oaten were civilised and full of information and honest debate. It was great! There were no arguments from hypocrisy, name-calling or general obfuscation. Although I support Labour principles, I’m not na

From Antonia and Jo, avoiding the first few results taken by another Andrew…

Andrew needs…

• …all the prayers he can get - if there is a god and he’s vindictive, this is entirely true
• …to apply wood preservative to one side of his garden fence - I’ll do exactly what it says in the search
• …strong parents who will remain steadfastly committed to him - happily, that’s not an issue
• …to increase his English vocabulary through direct instruction and independent reading - none taken
• …two a week - hard to disagree
• …to be hogtied - this is the worst punishment I’ve ever heard
• …to know how long it takes to extract DSTs from HPSS and how much cpu time to re-reconstruct - this has certainly been keeping me up at night

Holy crap, there really is a video iPod! I honestly didn’t think this was going to happen. What would be the point, I figured. You could watch music videos from iTunes and almost everything else would be technically illegal - Apple would be inviting a heap of trouble onto themselves. The only way to get around it would be to offer tv shows for download in iTunes, but that’ll never happen…Except, as it turns out, it will.

The Apple website is claiming to have full seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives, along with music videos. The device can also play mpeg4 and h.264¹ video, so any downloads you happen across while bittorrenting will be available.

Say what you will about the DRM², but you have to give them kudos for being first out of the door with a properly portable video player. The TV show distribution has the potential to be massive - I’ve never heard of a broadcaster releasing their shows for sale over the net before, but I guess Apple’s DRM has convinced them.

I don’t need one³, but if I was commuting on a train or bus? Hell yeah!

Update: I just thought - Rocketboom must be over the moon! Also, it’d be interesting to chart the iPods going up on eBay today

1. one day I must find out what this means [↩]
2. and I’m sure Cory will [↩]
3. I don’t, I don’t…I don’t [↩]

In an attempt to reduce my parentheses habit, I’ve installed a Wordpress footnotes plugin¹, which should help me keep to the point in posts². This is just a test to see how well it works…

Great, seems to be working well. It adds a ‘footnote’ quicktag to the Writing page, which makes things easy as pie³.

1. there are a couple of other implentations available [↩]
2. James Joyce never was my style [↩]
3. blueberry, to be exact. There’s more pi here [↩]