I’m thinking:

• Toy monkeys
• A beginner’s guide to swearing
• Dropping in unannounced, providing sweets, leaving
• Explaining that parents don’t know everything
• Did I mention toy monkeys?

That’s about it, right?

An email from my mother arrived a few minutes ago. It contained only a link to a website called ‘How to be a good Uncle’. I took about 4.5milliseconds to decide this was something I should probably phone home about.

My sister sounded very happy on the phone. Congratulations, Jane!

In six months, I shall be Uncle Andrew. Imagine that.

I thought she was getting fat.

A new species of leopard has been discovered. According to The Man On The Radio it lives in the tree canopies and eats monkeys. I am in two minds about this news. Still, at least it’s not feeding on Pacific Northwest Tree Octopuses.

I think somebody just tried to chat me up. This has never happened to me before. I thought the guy was being friendly when he said hello as I was standing by the river, enjoying the peace and quiet. Then he introduced himself, shook my hand and I thought he might ask if I’d found Jesus. He didn’t, but after a bit of chit-chat said “you’re not married, then?”. I mentioned Abi and he was gone a few seconds later. Kinda flattering, really.

Happy Pi Day. Do something irrational.
(update: or you could leave it until July)

In the past few days I’ve felt like ditching my current computer-fixing lifestyle multiple times:

• After seeing many pictures like this:
  
  I realised I definitely want to get a qualification in librarianship, then later run a small bookshop.
• This morning I was in the offices of a web-design company as a volunteer for their eye-tracking research. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly, and I decided it could be a very pleasant existence and wouldn’t take too much work on my part to achieve.
• I came home and saw Photojojo’s link to George Lange’s flipbook. After watching it twice I immediately wanted to find a local portrait photographer who would take me on as an apprentice.

I’ll be 24 in a couple of months. I was hoping to have all this stuff figured out by now.

I’ve just renewed my Flickr ‘Pro’ account for the first time in two years, as I was lucky enough to be given a free year when they were bought by Yahoo. I currently have 2,722 photos stored, and use the site on a daily basis. In the two years they’ve upgraded their site considerably with insignificant downtime, and have improved their data plans: I can now store unlimited photos with no constraints on monthly uploads. And all for $25/£13ish a year. With the possible exception of Google’s free Gmail, for me Flickr is the best value for money of any online service. I can’t begrudge them $25, in fact I’m more than happy to pay it.

I think they’re handy, anyway:

• Enable Firefox spell checking in the Visual editor
• Add a toggle switch for advanced features in the Visual editor (try shift-v in IE or alt-shift-v in Firefox to do it manually). The extra toolbar has ‘paste plain text’ and ‘remove formatting’ buttons, which will help with a couple of the VE’s annoyances.

Enough procrastinating, Andrew. Back to work.

I was very impressed with Radio 2’s ‘Pause for Thought’ this morning. The preacher managed to combine the Dawkins/Kay non-story and last week’s highly dubious global-warming denying C4 documentary into a tirade against the pitfalls of absolute certainty. A standard misrepresentation, but he then compared this to the wonder of his faith, which comes from experience and is therefore better. It was astonishing.

With the new Jane Austen kind-of-a-biopic out at cinemas, the BBC has an article on the enduring appeal of her novels. It includes biting criticism such as:

“I think she betrays her time and I’m always gob smacked by what she ignored,” says Celia Brayfield, author and lecturer at Brunel University. “She focused on such a narrow strain of human reality. Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the Napoleonic War going on at the time when she was writing, she doesn’t mention it.[...]“

I’m amazed at what critics can say with a straight face: JA writing romantic novels was a betrayal of her time. Maybe she has a point. If the new Harry Potter novel doesn’t mention Iraq, I’ll arrange a boycott. Later we have insights from the ex-editor of Nuts magazine. You might be temped to make assumptions about his views of women based on this, but don’t be so hasty. He is, after all, an Austen fan:

“She is fun, dry, ironic - as funny as any male writer out there,”

Praise indeed.

Given the large signs indicating the correct motorway exit, the presence of a sat-nav unit telling me to turn off and my having driven the route many times before, I wonder how I nevertheless managed to miss the M69. Oh well, doubling back only added twenty-five minutes to the eighty minute journey
I had a great and busy weekend with Abi, including seeing Coriolanus at the RST, a social dance¹ and trips to the Butterfly Farm and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I knew nothing about Coriolanus before Saturday, but enjoyed it very much. It was surprisingly fast-moving and unpredictable, neither of which I’ve found to be common Shakespearean traits², and the production was beautifully lit and staged. I really recommend it, especially since balcony tickets are £12.

This was at the Butterfly Farm:

I don’t need to own anything with a name that includes both ‘giant’ and ‘hissing’.

1. that a whole bunch of my friends failed to turn up to, disappointingly [↩]
2. not a criticism, just an observation [↩]

Midlands Today just had a report on monkeys. ‘Do monkeys have personalities?’, they asked. One trip to the Monkey Forest and a ‘Scientific Officer’ said ‘yes, they do have personalities’.

THIS IS GREAT.

This was harder than I expected. Here’s the trick: create a new text file in Notepad, and copy this into it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as “Show Desktop.scf” (enter the quotes to force notepad to save it as an .scf), then drag it to the Quick Launch bar.

…so says the BBC. A big shock.

I wonder whether the headline will have changed by morning. However, there’s also this from today’s news:

The 13 people who will be spending three months on an island in New Zealand for the BBC’s reality show Castaway have been revealed.

They include a lap dancer, a young Conservative, a former drug addict and a “professional psychic”.

Mustn’t be snobby. Mustn’t be snobby. At least they had the decency to use quotation marks.

I realise I should probably have explained more about Twitter if I wanted anybody to take the slightest notice The site asks ‘what are you doing?’, and you enter a small update on your current thoughts/actions, as often as you like. Anybody who’s interested then receives this either via the Twitter website, via an Instant Messaging service like Google Talk, or via a free text message. It works in reverse, too - these can both be used to update your status.

So far, so what? A tweeting blogger sums it up perfectly:

I’ve heard two kinds of criticisms of Twitter already.

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory–it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?” Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me–family and close friends–do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What’s interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There’s no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

It’s pleasing. And a little sweet. I won’t be using it every five minutes, but I’m finding myself liking the concept more and more. My profile’s here.