The ‘free stress test’ gives away that this is a bunch of scientologist brainwashing con-artists. They’re even selling Dianetics around the corner. Ugh.

The UN nuclear committee today said that Iran has failed to halt uranium enrichment programmes. This is a country run by a psychotic who wants to wipe Israel of the face of the Earth, while preparing for the coming of the 12th imam. Also, 3 million people in Darfur are on the brink of starvation, yet today the UN halved food rations because of a lack of funds. The rations before were pretty much the minimum level needed for survival. The UK and the EU have provided very little, with the major donations coming from the US. It’s hard to see it as anything but a massive failure by the international community.

You’d think these would be pressing issues, but the main story on the news is the shocking revelation that some prisoners re-offend after release. A massive five people, from 1000 who should have been deported, reoffended. Five! The end of civilisation as we know it, clearly. The BBC correspondent is currently saying that the government has “failed to protect the public”. Could we possibly get some perspective? Sure prisoner release was a mistake, but it wasn’t malicious, and is it actually all that important? I appreciate that those who suffered violence at the hands of those released may feel otherwise, but on a national/international scale, aren’t there far worse things requiring public attention? It’s not that I’m blindly defending Labour, I just really don’t understand the fuss over this issue.

Fyi for UK readers: the new series of Lost starts next week. It’s moving to Tuesday evenings at 2200, directly after new CSIs on C5. I imagine there’s a large overlap in CSI/Lost viewers, so this is a clever move on C4’s part. I would be among the CSI viewers, but after three broken Freeview boxes I’m stuck with only four channels. Decent freeview boxes apparently start from £90, but I can’t justify that atm. Maybe I’ll ask for one for my birthday, which is coming up in…oh, what is it now…ah yes, 21 days.

That’s just cool.

The 2.5 minute trailer is apparently due out very soon.

Following my last post, some calming penguins from Flickr:

and there’s always room for ducklings:

and…relax.

I can’t stand driving. It’s an evil necessity, and I hate it. I particularly despise driving on hot, blue-sky days, because the sheer level of wank on the roads increases by orders of magnitude. There seem to be large numbers of people who think hot days mean they can drive any way they like, because they’re feeling good.

Driving from Stratford to Solihull is a half-hour trip, and today’s journeys were just awful. I’d look in the mirror, see a car in the distance, and within seconds it’d be on my back bumper. Most of the time they hover, swerve around a bit just so I know they’re there, then roar past at the first opportunity. I wish this didn’t piss me off, but I can’t help thinking that if anybody pulled out of nearby driveways or junctions, I’d be killed because somebody’s too stupid to understand road safety. Maybe they’re all rushing heavily bleeding passengers to hospital, or maybe they’re just thick. It’s not just this, though. Some people decide to teach me a lesson by tailgating, or backing off then zooming up real close. I decided to get out of the way of one van who did this repeatedly, and pulled into a layby as he roared past, horn blaring. There are also plenty of people who go too fast for corners, so cut across onto my side of the road. I’m a nervous wreck by the time I finish the trip.

The odd part is that the drive back, at 2300, was just as bad as driving there at 1800. In fact it was slightly worse, as sheer volume of traffic didn’t help slow things down. People must still be on a high from the day’s weather, I guess.

I’ve had people explain ‘the unofficial laws of the road’ to me (apparently 90’s the limit on the motorway, 60 everywhere else) and I guess this has a “sunny days = fun!” clause, but I can’t do it. I’m not going to break the law, even if 99% of people do. Maybe that makes me pathetic, naive, and deserving of ridicule, but I refuse to allow the possibility of killing somebody just because I was too weak to stand up for what I think’s right.

If anything’s going to make me move to London at some point, it’ll be the Tube. Getting around without a car would be so very nice.

Sorry. Some days it just gets the better of me. Bring on the clouds.

Google today released a free version of SketchUp, the before-now-$600 3D modelling program. It’s fun. Here’s a house I want:

Never mind the pool, tunnel and space elevator: death slide, baby!

The program itself is far easier to use than any other 3D program I’ve ever tried. Hell, if I figured it out it must be simple - I normally give up in frustration after trying to build a square and ending up with non-Euclidean geometric primitives. The built-in tutorials are very helpful, too.

You can’t go inside the houses, so it’s not much use as an interior design program, but for exterior house modelling it’s certainly interesting. It fully supports real dimensions, and you can use your own textures, so it should be possible to create very accurate replicas of buildings. Google are touting the built-in Google Earth links, which let you create a 3d version of your house for display in GE, although I don’t find this as exciting as does the SketchUp website You can download (and upload) models from an online warehouse, so if you ever wondered what the White House would look like with monkey-army-deterring turrets in the front garden, now’s your chance.

You know what’d be great? An exporter into Second Life You could rapidly construct a mansion in Sketchup, then do all the interior design inside SL.

Sorry this isn’t terribly in-depth, I’m just heading out to dancing.

Despite all the online coverage, I can’t seem to find a decent explanation of the prisoner-release “scandal”. I may well be wrong, but is the story that some foreign criminals, due to be released from prison anyway, weren’t considered for deportation? Nobody was released early, or without servicing a sentence, right? If so, is that it? Why’s it so important? What’s the difference between releasing foreigners and people who happened to be born in the UK, in practical terms? If the rules weren’t followed properly then, sure, there should be some kind of investigation, but given the uproar you’d think the country was about to slip into anarchy or something. Of course, I could be misunderstanding the whole thing…

I was in a foul mood earlier this evening. No particular cause, really, just a combination of minor annoyances. I snapped at my parents a couple of times, then drove home feeling pissed off, until a song called C’est la fucking vie yanked me right out of it. On the surface it doesn’t seem the most cheerful song, but the lyrics are wry and reminded me that it’s easier to laugh at crap. And I felt better. You can hear the whole song here, buy it here and visit the artist’s website here.

Didn’t get the job Damn! I was really hoping I would - it would have been perfect for me. Never mind. They let me know pretty quickly, at least. I’ll try to come up with a new plan.

Be very careful when typing ‘I can blow air though my tear ducts’. One typo on ‘tear’ and the whole sentence becomes far more impressive, but somewhat creepy.

I have a job interview this morning. I haven’t had a job interview since I was 17. It’s for the library assistant post I mentioned a while ago, and there are apparently going to be three people in the room. Three. Will it be like Pop Idol? I hope they don’t try to make me cry.

I can, incidentally, blow air through my tear ducts¹. People hate it, but it’s funny.

1. another typo just turned ducts into ducks, but that makes no sense [↩]

1. The Earth. It’s an animation made from a series of images taken by the Messenger spacecraft as it whipped away “toward” Mercury. You’ve seen the same thing countless times in CGI, but this is real.
2. Lady in the Water. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest has a trailer that creates a real atmosphere in less than a minute. Very nicely done, imho. It’s due out this summer.

I’ve finally managed to fix the display bugs plaguing readers using IE6. This site looked fine in Opera / Firefox, but IE users had many sidebar problems, including: images that were partially invisible, inconsistent spacing of text, plus all sorts of text-sometimes-appearing-sometimes-not weirdness. Turns out that they were all to do with an IE6 whitespace bug, officially called Whitespace-in-Lists, and this page told me all I needed to know.

If you have any kind of HTML list element, either <ol> or <ul>, IE6 will add extra whitespace between the <li> elements. This normally isn’t a problem, but when there are margins of other elements close by the rendering gets all screwy - it seems like IE isn’t accounting for the extra height when trying to render other elements, although I don’t know this for sure. For whatever reason, the way around the problem is to define a width for the <ol> or <ul> elements. For example: ul { width:100%; } will handle it in the majority of cases, or you may need to specify a pixel width.

Hopefully the site looks much neater for people using IE6, now. Please let me know if you see any bugs.

A couple of months back I mentioned a song called ‘Super Powers’ by Mark Says Hi. I’d heard it on the Daily Source Code podcast, but found it wasn’t available to purchase online. I emailed the the artist - the eponymous Mark - to say that I’d happily buy the song if I could. We exchanged a couple of emails, then last week I received a package containing his CD, plus some extra goodies! Many thanks to him for this unexpected gift. Super Powers is the stand-out track, imho, but the other songs are pretty good, and anything with Princess Bride references gets my approval Not much more I can say other than that he seems to be a cool guy, so check out his site if rock music’s your thing.

The BBC breaking news alert thingy just popped up. Either something is going on that is beyond comprehension, or there’s a BBC employee banging his/her head into the desk right now