I had a conversation this evening that, somehow, ended up describing the word ‘testicle’ as an ‘onomatopoeic metaphor’. I’m pretty sure that phrase covers all words, doesn’t it?

(It’s just occurred to me that ‘no, you’re just talking bollocks’ might be an appropriate answer)

I have a feeling most people know this one, but it was new for me:

portmanteau - A word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words, as chortle, from chuckle and snort (e.g. cephalopodufascist)

Do you think the ten men who took a BMW motorbike from Branscombe beach this afternoon filled in the correct salvage form, and furthermore are planning to give the bike back? Because if not, letting BBC News film them at the beach, follow them home and interview them might not have been all that clever. Not that it was all that clever to begin with. The news says looters interested onlookers have travelled from as far as Liverpool. What the hell?

I felt sorry for Ruth Kelly over her child’s schooling furore - just because Labour aim for state education to be the equal of private doesn’t mean it actually is, or that somebody should support it at the expense of their child, imho - but trying to get Catholic adoption agencies excluded from anti-discrimination laws is just appalling. They’d rather close down than place children with same-sex couples? These people are charged with looking after children - how dare they behave like that! Can you imagine their reaction if an adoption agency refused to give children to Catholic families¹? There’s no basis for their argument other than scripture, and that’s no way to decide anything.

It’s blackmail, and puts the government into a horrible position. It’s all very well my and other secularists saying that in the long term it’s better for everyone, as well as being morally correct, but that doesn’t help the kids in the system now who would be negatively impacted. It’s hard to believe that the Catholic Church’s apparent obsession with harmless sex trumps their concern for children’s welfare, but if they follow through with the threats it seems to be a logical conclusion. Ophelia and Antonia are worth reading. Harry’s Place have a piece on a Muslim police officer refusing to have body contact with male colleagues that touches on similar issues:

People must realise that while it is fine to hold beliefs that restrict their behaviour, it is not up to the rest of society to accom[m]odate those self-imposed restrictions. If you want to limit your range of action and interaction, then you have to accept that [there] are consequences for yourself that you cannot transfer to other people.

Quite. I’m always intrigued by the dividing line. If I, as a Pastafarian, demand to converse only in pirate-speak, I’d obviously get kicked out of the police without a moment’s hesitation. But how many people do I need to convert before I go from raving loon to man with beliefs deserving of respect²? Hundreds? Thousands?

Happily, the press reports seem to indicate that the rest of the Cabinet are sensible enough to reject the exemptions. Do you think that twenty years from now we’ll have trouble believing his debate ever happened?

1. on the basis that it’s bad for the children to be exposed to insane views on homosexuality, presumably. Hmmm. Interesting. [↩]
2. in the eyes of a hundred Comment Is Free columnists, anyway [↩]

Stewart Lee, writer of Jerry Springer: The Opera, is confused as to why he and other comedians are continually praised for attacking ‘political correctness’:

With Borat the highest-grossing adult-rated film in the US for 2006, the writing team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant booming with a second series of Extras, and Little Britain still riding high, it’s clear that the comedy of shock, bad taste and outrage shows no sign of disappearing. But reading about these shows in print and online, they are often described in a way that makes me, for one, feel as if I have been watching different material from everyone else.

He states his appreciation for the good that ‘political correctness’ has done over the years, then quotes The Office writer Stephen Merchant:

“We’re endlessly cited as being non-PC, and yet we sit and agonise for ages over what we put into the scripts, and over whether our choices can be defended, both morally and intellectually,” he says. “We may push things, but we’re always motivated by satirical imperatives.” But the duo’s scripts do use non-PC language? “Yes,” explains Merchant, clearly slotting back into a tramline he has had to follow many times before. “But we deal in taboos and hot areas by appearing to approach them from a non-PC standpoint, but as soon as you even introduce topics that PC has declared off limits, people assume you are trying to be dangerous and politically incorrect. Often we’re all unsure of what to say, for example, in the company of someone who is disabled. These are areas ripe for comedy because of social anxiety, not because the subject itself is intrinsically funny. A joke about race, and about how we react to race, is not necessarily a racist joke. That is fundamental. Political correctness has made the world better for those who might otherwise have been unfairly marginalised, but there is the problem of the idea that you cannot discuss different areas for fear of being politically incorrect.”

The article develops to a broader theme, and is a good read. It also contains the sentence:

At the end of September last year, I was lucky enough to attend the St Geronimo feast-day celebrations at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, while helping out on a Radio 4 documentary about clowns.

That is brilliant. I want to do that.

Quick version: If you’re having problems with ’svchost.exe’ stalling your computer at Windows startup, it’s possible it can fixed by disabling Microsoft Update, at least until a fix is released. This can be done by going to the Windows Update link in Internet Explorer, selecting ‘Change settings’ on the left, then running the the uninstall option at the bottom. This still allows automatic downloading of standard core Windows updates, but not for Office. This is not the same as disabling all Windows updates in the control panel, which is a bad idea. I’ve used this fix on three computers in the past day and it’s fixed the problem on them all.

Longer version: For a few months I’ve been seeing computers stall at Windows startup (and other occasions, such as when loading IE) for minutes at a time. Mouse-clicks stacked up and were run all of a sudden once svchost decided it was done chugging. The task manager revealed only that ’svchost.exe’ was taking up 100% of the CPU, which was unhelpful. ‘Svchost’ is a generic container for Windows services - the background programs that *should* be of little interest to the average users. A little investigation (I got sidetracked by thinking it was linked to iPods for a while) and some googling finally turned up links to this Microsoft KB article, which accurately describes the problem. The high cpu usage is apparently caused by the Windows Update service, and seems to be widespread. A few forum posts indicated it was Microsoft Update causing the problem: MU is an optional upgrade that monitors Office (and other Microsoft programs?) for updates, rather than just the core Windows files monitored by the standard Windows Update. The WU website asks if you want to install MU on every visit, and I expect many people have (I do by default).

Microsoft apparently have a hotfix for the issue, but are still testing it for public release. I hope they get a move on - there must be people who’ve spotted that the problem started after they enabled updates, so have simply disabled Windows updates entirely in the control panel. You can live without automatic Office updates for a while, but core Windows updates are just too important. It can be hard enough convincing people to turn on automatic updates in the first place, too.

These blogs seem to be tracking the issue, and one suggests there’s a public hotfix coming in the not-too-distant future. Hopefully it’ll be automatically applied.

Anecdotal evidence suggests it must be very difficult to write decent backup software, given that I’ve never found anything that works very well. For the past couple of years I’ve been using Acronis True Image, and it’s proven invaluable when creating disk images and is great for transferring data around generally. Its backup feature, however, leaves something to be desired.

A while ago I set it up on a client’s server and configured it to create a ‘full’ backup drive image once a week, plus a nightly incremental backup with just the day’s changed files. Using these seven files I would be able to restore any file from the past week, and the entire drive image if necessary. It worked well until last week when the main hard drive started to report bad sectors.

Trueimage popped up a question at the first sign of a bad sector. It was having trouble reading the data, did I want to retry, ignore, ignore all or cancel? I’m glad it made me aware of the problem, but I can’t find an option to always set ‘ignore all’, and every night’s backup therefore stopped after five minutes, requiring manual intervention at midnight¹. There’s also no way, as far as I can see, to set a timeout on the sector failures, and as more areas died the backup progressed less and less even with ‘ignore all’ manually clicked².

This was irritating, but shouldn’t have been much of a problem. My original plan was to grab the seven backup files and use a different machine to restore the last successfully backed-up drive image onto a replacement drive (the important and daily-changing data files are backed up independently, and I could restore them at the same time). This way I could quickly swap the replacement drive into the server with only a few minutes of downtime. However, the last weekly ‘full’ backup failed to complete due to sector errors, but True Image had already deleted the last successful one. Without the full backup the incremental files aren’t much use, and most of them failed anyway. So I’m left with seven completely useless backup files, and no data.

All the important files are safe, but having to reinstall and reconfigure Windows turns a half-hour job into the better part of a day. Since dying hard drives are a major reason for having backups in the first place, it’s a shame True Image failed to cope. I should say this is True Image version 9 - it’s possible version 10 copes better, but I’m not paying to find out.

I hear good things about SyncBack. I’ll have to take a look.

1. accountants are up late working on tax returns throughout January, so it couldn’t be set to an earlier time [↩]
2. It would also be friendly to let me know which file(s) is having problems, but it’s possible their architecture doesn’t work this way, so I’ll let them off [↩]

It requires an accomplice.

You: It’s windy.
Stooge: No it’s not, it’s Thursday.
You: So am I, let’s have a cup of tea.

This never stops being funny.

*phone rings*

Me: Hello?
She: Hi, I don’t know whether you’ll be able to help me. You don’t happen to have a pony called Rocky, do you?
Me: I don’t…
She: Ok, thanks anyway! Bye.

This has brightened my day. I am now intrigued as to who Rocky could belong to, and why he needs to be tracked down. Is he lost? Has he run away? Does he have a magic pony-sense that attracts him to anybody with my surname? Have I been involved in the periphery of an epic love story, where a beautiful princess (she had a nice voice, so it’s reasonable to assume she’s a princess) is striving to track down the one true love who once rescued her from a stream and gallantly carried her home on his pony, named Rocky, but left before she could get anything other than his surname? Or is Rocky a hyper-intelligent pony who is keeping his abilities secret lest the government take him away for testing, and was therefore powerless to prevent his being sold by the wicked stepfather of his beloved owner? Or, has he been kidnapped?! Poor Rocky!

I’m also a little concerned that in a few minutes I’ll remember that I do, in fact, own a pony called Rocky. This tends to happen when I deny things outright.

A bunch of my favourite skeptical blogs and podcasts are out at The Amazing Meeting 5 in Las Vegas. The annual conference has skepticism and humanism as its main themes and attracts some big names. I’m very jealous. Speakers and performers include James Randi, Penn and Teller, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Michael Shermer, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Wiseman, Phil Plait, the Skeptics’ Guide team, the editors of The Onion and Scientific American, and plenty more…As ever, I spent ten seconds working out whether I could afford to go, two minutes contemplating large amounts of debt and five minutes being generally grumpy with the universe. However, I’ve heard James Randi mention the possibility of a UK meeting, which would be excellent indeed if anything comes of it.

The Skeptics’ Guide is having a meetup at “Quark’s Bar” at the Star Trek Experience. Nod and I couldn’t resist going there a couple of years ago. As I recall it was pretty expensive, but worth it for the sheer geeky indulgence According to my diary our waiter introduced himself as an ambassador, Klingons wandered around looking fierce, and there was a simulator ride in which a shuttle trip went catastrophically wrong (imagine that). The ’shuttle crew’ were remarkably impressive given they must have performed the same routine hundreds of times, and we were seconds from death when the Enterprise-D turned up to save us, which was actually, um, surprisingly cool Plus, the store sold these:

Don’t pretend you don’t want one.

*Spoiler warning*

I did miss something, then. I was going to write about how it was a shame to end with the status quo intact, then compare and contrast it with the X-Files, which was always great at throwing spanners into the works in series finales. But, not so much. Bah. Bubbling hands disrupt my blogging. Do you think non-Doctor Who fans had any clue what was going on when the Tardis whisked him off? I quite enjoyed it, although it wouldn’t be difficult to pick holes - I think everybody apart from Captain Scarlet Jack should feel some remorse after being directly responsible for the deaths of half of Cardiff, for example - but, as with the series as a whole, it was all done with such a sense of fun that I feel grumpy complaining. One question, though: did I miss the rift generator machine thing earlier in the series? It was quite the device to suddenly drop in…

Overall I thought it was an entertaining series. There were a few dodgy episodes in the first half, but it picked up after that. I’d say ‘Out of Time’ (not just because of the very distracting Diane) and ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’ were my favourites, although ‘Random Shoes’ was rather sweet. Incidentally, ‘Combat’ - the fighting weevil episode - was written by Mickey. Sure, the show was a little silly at times, but there was enough characterisation, plot threads and amusing dialogue to keep me interested. A second series has been commissioned, and it seems at least possible that Captain Jack might make an appearance in the new Doctor Who. I imagine the Doctor might want some answers regarding the Beast, given that he went to so much effort keeping it locked up last series…

I just finished watching the Torchwood finale, except that my recording cut out early. I saw some bubbling water, and that was it. I can’t think I’ve missed much - possibly only a few seconds if they’ve left it on a cliffhanger. I’ll leave the torrent downloading overnight and catch it in the morning.

Today marks the 300th anniversary of the act of union between England and Scotland. The Telegraph is appalled that schools are doing nothing to celebrate this. It is disgusting, it is ludicrous, it is outrageous. Give the letters page time to get going and I’m sure it’ll be some kind of violation. Obviously, I am not one to argue with the Telegraph. The act of union is being forgotten? As a tribute I’m going to take just a couple of minutes out of my day and try to care.

Nope, didn’t work. Let me try again.

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

Just isn’t happening. There must be reasons it’s worth spending any time thinking about, right? And worth boring schoolkids to tears over?

I had a great history teacher at GCSE. He could probably make the act of union seem interesting. I’m sure it is, when you investigate it enough and put it into context. Most things are. But, what’s the point? I’m probably more interested in history than the average person, and I’ve had a quick look at the relevant wikipedia entry. I learnt that Daniel Defoe was involved as a spy for the English, that on the day itself Edinburgh castle bells played the tune of ‘why should I be so sad on my wedding day?’, and that plenty of money changed hands. It has some virtue as fodder for general knowledge quizzes, but, quite frankly, wasn’t worth more than a few minutes. I can see that there’s a certain symbolism, but relative to hundreds of other events in ‘British’ history it seems of minor importance. There’s only so much time in a schoolday, and there are many exciting and relevant historical events to study. ‘Why is more being spent to mark the abolition of slavery?’, asks the Telegraph. Presumably because that’s an important lesson, an inherently interesting thing and something that dramatically improved the lives of millions of people. When the best you can do is:

[h]istorians consider [the union] one of the most important events in the nation’s history, laying the foundations for imperial expansion a century later

It sounds like you’re reaching. Chest-swelling “it’s a part of our heritage” patriotic sentiment is fine for people who are into in that kind of thing, but why force it onto schoolkids who find history dull to begin with?

I think this irritated me because of the obvious pretence. Maybe there are people who feel a patriotic swelling when they think of the act of union, but I doubt it. Do the people writing articles demand ‘we’ mark the anniversary of William the Conqueror’s arrival too? Surely that’s a far more important date in British history? It seems unlikely. So what’s it really all about? Here’s where I have no evidence and start making things up. Is it to remind people that Scotland and England were once separate countries? Is it, like Neil says, that what they really want is an independent Scotland and a larger, more powerful and thoroughly Tory England? Or is it just to snipe at education?

I guess some people would say ‘it’s interesting if you’re Scottish’. Really? The only way it gets relevant is if you think that Scotland is actively harmed by the union to this day. I don’t know about that, but there’s such fuss it seems possible there could be legitimate grievances. But they’re drowned out by the ‘Scotland should become independent’ brigade. The fact that this seems completely stupid is probably because I’m a southerner and haven’t had to suffer the indignity of an ‘English’ parliament setting rules for Scotland. Or whatever. Maybe there are valid complaints in this regard, but surely there are better solutions than declaring independence? Like regional assemblies, or something? It’s not like the UK is really one big, arbitrarily-divided island, with people who are, on average, the same, with minds that if wiped of all memory of three-hundred year old slights against people long dead would have no reason to resent each other. I find it hard to believe that the ‘English’ parliament is actually blind, nationalistic and uninterested in the issues that arise in Scotland, but I can see that devolution would be beneficial, up to a point. I’m sure I’m naive, comfortable in my little isolated existence etc. but isn’t it always the case that creating artificial boundaries between people causes more problems than it solves?

I drove through a red light this evening. Not a clue how or why. I’d been sitting there waiting, and can only imagine that something somewhere turned green - possibly the lights further around the roundabout - and I moved off. First time I’ve done that (or, at least, that I’m aware of having done that). I wasn’t particularly tired or distracted, it just happened…weird. There was nobody around so it was safe, but the junction was at a slip road exit so it’s possible there was a camera somewhere. I’ll completely deserve the points on my license if that comes through. Pretty stupid.

I fully support Lisa’s hug-a-blogger campaign. Big hugs to anybody suffering from January blues, or indeed anybody who just wants a hug:

{{{{{{{{{{HUG}}}}}}}}}}