It’s all over the internets, but makes me laugh:

Via BoingBoing.

A late notice for today’s Day In The Life at Flickr, in which you’re asked to submit five photographs from your day. Last time I was walking around Central Park, so today probably won’t be quite so exotic. It’s a fun project, and always interesting to see what other people choose to document.

Just to recommend Jerome’s Query Diagnostics plugin for Wordpress, which once enabled spits out a list of all the database queries used by a page, along with the time they took to complete. This afternoon I found that one plugin was doubling the processing time, and removing that has made the whole site snappier.  I was trying to do this by looking at mysql logs, but it seems such things don’t really exist on a per-user basis, so anybody sharing a server with x number of others is going to struggle to diagnose connection problems. People recommend other plugins, but JQD was the only one that worked for me.

My flat is lovely, but some of the previous occupant’s upgrades were, shall we say, shoddy at best. I’m having major work done on the bathroom this week, and I had a call this morning to say it would start a day earlier than expected. I wasn’t completely prepared so had to dash around getting everything sorted, but it went well. I was very impressed with the quality of the workmanship - they were very fast and even swept up before leaving. At one point they needed to move a gas pipe, and managed to get a Corgi registered engineer out within half an hour. Blimey. They’ll be back early tomorrow morning to fit a new shower, install an extractor fan, and various other jobs that have needed doing since I moved in. It’ll be great once it’s all finished.

I’m having a bunch of work done on my bathroom, including a new shower. The guys arrived maybe forty minutes ago, and the current shower is already completely removed. The sound of smashing tiles is currently drifting into the lounge. That happened fast.

Note to self: never buy Tesco’s own brand ‘healthy eating’ chunky chips. Ever again. They’re cheap for a reason.

I notice that adding a comment doesn’t work properly any more. The comment actually gets posted after you hit ‘Submit’, but the page doesn’t refresh with the promised strawberries. I offer my humblest apologies for the disappointment that must have ensued. I’ll try to get it fixed up.

This Friday I’ll be driving to Torquay for a dancing weekend. I’ve been to a few before, but this is the first to be run over three nights. When I reserved a place six months ago I thought it would be a good intensive weekend, but not so much. Other people at my dance group decided they’d be bored of dancing by the third night, and apparently suggested we do something else instead. So, on Sunday evening we’ll head to another hotel to watch some ‘live entertainment’, and that morning’s teaching session is now a vague possibility rather than a definite feature. I’m increasingly pissed off about this.

It’s rather strange that people want to go on a dancing weekend and not dance much, but obviously they can do what they like. It’s a shame they convinced our teachers everybody feels the same way, though. The weekend cost £155, which, while good value for the standard of hotel, made a serious dent in my already-depleted finances last month. I could do without the apparently pointless extra day. I don’t know why they didn’t scrap the Friday night dance instead, since we’ll have had a four-hour drive already that day. Without any dancing on Sunday it’s more like a mini-holiday than a learning weekend. That would be ok, but isn’t what I’ve been looking forward to.

I suppose it’s really about a difference in how we view the class. I think many of the regulars now think of it as a social evening, and those of us who still see it as primarily a dance class are outnumbered. Oh well, I mustn’t get pessimistic - it’ll probably be a fun time, if a bit of a waste. Sorry to whine, I just feel cheated.

Just back home after a great weekend. I met Abi’s family for the first time on Saturday night. I was more nervous than I’d anticipated, but it went well, and I didn’t make any massive faux pas. I hope.

Since moving into my flat I’ve been used to a status quo, but in the last couple of months there’ve been numerous large and wonderful changes: two good friends got engaged, my sister revealed she’s pregnant, and, most dramatic of all, I met Abi. No matter what happens, last year’s status quo is gone for good. It’s interesting to be heading into such unknown territory, and I’m feeling particularly happybouncycheerful about it all.

Must go to bed. Losing ability to conjugate.

Chocolate truffle Monkey Cake. Is good.

I finally figured out how to view search keywords in my drowning-in-corporatespeak Google Analytics statistics (it’s in ‘Marketing Optimization’ -> ‘Search Engine Marketing’ -> ‘Overall Keyword Conversion’, if you’re interested). Some of my favourite ones so far this month:

• morena baccarin nuked - Typo or extreme fetish?
• is cornstarch the same as cornflour - I remember trying to figure this out, and sympathise with the questioner. Pretty much.
• homeopathic cures for earwax - Don’t be silly.
• team america best lines - I think he’s trying to tell us something. Gary, you can’t blame yourself for what gorillas did. There is no ‘I’ in Team America. Arec Barrrwiiiin.
• andrew+nice - It’s true.
• death by aspiration - Time for a war on want.
• can smoking kill animals - If they’re already on fire, it’s probably too late.
• why do cats drool? - Because they are cats. Obviously. If they were dogs, they would rule.

Also, people continue to be fascinated by wank-a-thons, rasturbation and Lost.

My reading has been tremendously slow recently, and I’m still working on Stephen King’s ‘Cell’. As ever, he manages to slip fondness beneath my radar.

I’ve been reading about the same three characters for a couple of weeks, and it’s been pleasant enough. The story hasn’t demanded my every spare moment, but I’ve enjoyed settling into bed and discovering what happens next.

Today: peril. And it’s awful. Somehow these three characters have become my friends. I didn’t notice it happen, but I do not want anything bad to happen to them. I would be upset if anything bad happened to them. But it’s Stephen King, and he could kill / horrifically maim anybody at any point. Or it could end happily. There’s no way to predict the guy. Before today it was an ok read, now it’s a tome trapping companions who don’t deserve this.

This happens to me every time with Stephen King. His characters slip into my real-world shadows more than other authors’. It’s not that other books don’t regularly do the same thing, it’s that SK seems to do it so effortlessly. There are no obvious moments of character building, it’s more a slow burn of conversation and small reactions. I’m always amazed. Of what I’ve read of his, Bag of Bones and The Dead Zone had me shaking, but I think The Stand contains his most memorable characters. It’s an epic read, and I lost family members in that book.

(updated)

I’m still enjoying using Twitter, by the way. The sidebar on the right-hand side might not last if it keeps stalling the blog whenever Twitter has a strop, mind.

I’ve set up Twessenger, which updates MSN’s ‘personal’ messages with your latest Tweet. It works, although I seem to have to manually enable it every time I restart. Hopefully there’ll be a Messenger Plus script with similar functionality before long.

I’m using Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress, which has various features including hourly backups of tweets, non-stalling display in the sidebar etc.. It also has an option to post an automatic Tweet whenever I create a new blog post. I’m in two minds about this. I like the idea, but I feel like it must be annoy to continually receive such messages via SMS. Right now I’m writing a bunch of posts now and have disabled it. Still, the implementation is great.

In other news, why can’t I ever type implementation without pausing?

Flickr’s new ‘Collections’ feature was released yesterday. It enables sets of sets, an option that some people have spent literally years asking for. It’s a neat little system, completely controlled from the impressive Organizr. Aside from the five possible levels of nesting, it lets you create a mosaic from images within the collection and displays this as the collection logo. I’ve set up a few here, and I think I was first to report a bug involving gaps appearing in collection names exceeding 15 letters. Ahem. The only downer is that you can’t currently display both collections and sets on your (newly grey) home page sidebar.

They’ve also added the option to display 5 large images on your home page, rather than 19 smaller versions. I rather like it.

I finished a big project today, and am finally able to relax. It’s possible there’ll be more to do, but the main body should be out of the way now. It’s a great relief - I was getting to the point where I felt guilty doing anything else. But now it’s over, and there’s now nothing standing between me and editing the NaNoWriMo novel. Yikes.