I didn’t think I could be surprised by mainstream coverage of pseudoscience, then along came the Independent with “My war on electrosmog: Julia Stephenson sets out to clear the airwaves”. The subtitle is:

How one woman fought back after being diagnosed by her naturopath with overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies

and the whole thing similarly reads like an Onion article. To say it gets worse is an understatement. Here’s a sample:

“Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals,” says London-based complementary health practitioner Dr Nicole de Canha.

Even cordless hands-free home telephones - such a boon to multitaskers, enabling one to patiently listen to friends and family for hours while cleaning cupboards, re-potting house plants and reorganising the CD collection - are now off-limits. Their electrical force-field is nearly as powerful as that of a mobile phone. Since I’m now chained to a phone on a lead, my cupboards are filthy and my friends are neglected. But at least I’m less radioactive.

Radioactive?! (also, why the filth and neglect?)

We also have magical ‘holograph field’ pendants, ‘electro-dictatorships’, homeopathic drops that may ‘reduce the amount of radiation in the body’ and liberal quoting of people who appear to have no training in electrical engineering or medicine, all wrapped up in a brightly coloured cape of paranoid scaremongering.

Anybody playing a pseudoscientific drinking game would die. Do you think it could be a spoof? It’s almost too ridiculous. As ever, Bad Science has the best coverage.

Manic day. A job I estimated would take five minutes stretched into five hours. Simply put: a company can’t connect to a couple of popular IPs, and I’m damned if I can find a reason why. Incredibly frustrating. I’ll head back there tomorrow, but am hoping some ideas pop into my head overnight. Then this evening I nipped over to Nottingham to pick up my forgotten camera, which I’ll be needing it for the upcoming dance weekend. It was nice to see Abi too, of course
On the way back I listened to the latest in Escape Pod’s audio of the Short Story Hugo nominees. Impossible Dreams and today’s The House Beyond Your Sky were both excellent. I don’t envy the judges one bit.

Ugh, it’s nearly 0200. Bad.

I have had no salt for a couple of months. I don’t know how anybody has salt. Nobody remembers, in the middle of Tesco, that they need salt. Other than people who’ve made lists, obviously. But that’s cheating. Far more fun to get home and realise that yet again you slipped into the fluorescent netherworld befuddle bubble, and although you’ve got bacon, which you never eat, and chicken sauce, which you’ve got nine of already, the concept of salt was lost to you for those forty minutes. This was me last week:

• 1100: Right. Today shall be different. I’ll be in and out. Quickly. No worries.
• 1105: Did that announcer just say ‘good morning customers?’. Shall I shout ‘ho-de-ho’? Better not. Why is that person giving me a funny look?
• 1110: There are many people in front of the bananas. I’ll loop around the salads and come back.
• 1111: Strawberries! No. Mustn’t.
• 1112: Are those…the same people? The same people? HOW LONG CAN IT TAKE TO CHOOSE BANANAS?!

You know how irritating it is when the person ahead of you decides to pay by cheque / forgets their pin / can’t find their wallet? A while back I started counting how long these procedures actually took. I reckon it rarely adds more than twenty seconds. I had the same thing with Hettie the arrival-time-predicting sat-nav: traffic-jams that seemed to take hours to clear only added three minutes to the journey. I’ve decided I can’t be bothered getting annoyed at ‘wasting’ anything less than fifteen minutes, and it’s impressive how much calmer my day becomes.

The cut-down theme didn’t affect downtime much, so I’ve reverted to the original. It was looking tired so I tweaked it a little. I’m still not happy, but it’s better than before. The search box is now linked to Google, rather than an internal search. Google can search the entire page contents, comments and all, rather than the previous system which was limited to posts. It’s less fun for me as I can’t view stats on local searches, but that’s no big deal.

The lack of difference makes me suspect the problems are more to do with my hosts than my site. I’ve been using mon.itor.us to monitor system uptime. It works well for server failures, but can’t detect database problems. If my website responds with a ‘cannot connect to database’ error, mon.itor.us still registers this as a positive response. It’s not possible to monitor a mysql server directly with their software, but I found a blog with a clever idea: monitor the phpmyadmin login page - that’ll go down with the database. I think the database is going down frequently, and hopefully this will confirm my suspicions.

I’ve been a little disappointed in my hosts - Textdrive. I can appreciate that their job is to keep computers up and running rather than to help maintain individual sites, but none of my recent queries have even been answered, even an (you’d think) easy one regarding my general server load and whether I’m reaching the limits of shared hosting. Shame.

The Plan: a sneak attack:

But it is not to be. Oh noes!

I hope everybody has their towel with them today.

Gmail has officially jumped the shark. They’re putting spam in the toolbar now!

This joke brought to you by my 13 year old self. The modern me is elsewhere.

Via BA, a scale image of all known planetary bodies with a diameter of over 200 miles. It’s fascinating. I knew there were moons larger than Mercury, but Ganymede’s not all that much smaller than Mars. I’d be annoyed if I were that big and still called a moon.

In 1986, in a remote area of Cameroon, 1800 people in a circle of 12-mile radius abruptly fell over and died. Scientists investigated, and after a year’s research realised measures were needed to prevent it happening again. Neatorama has the full story.

And, why eBooks are better than, er, Books, when it comes to bathtime. Read the various bookshop blogs and you’d think eBooks were the worst idea since marmite, but I’m happy to discover there are blogs who think otherwise. Andrew Marr, too. Booksquare - it of the wonderful header illustration - thinks the iPhone might be a major step forward…

My computer is now back in working order, hooray! The whole process took about a day, which isn’t bad going. Unfortunately the Network Connection Just Dropping problem still occurs, but I’ve discovered that dis-and-re-enabling the interface solves it without requiring a restart, which is a start. There’s no sign of USB-related crashes, which is very pleasant. I miss my dual-core processor, though. This morning I’ve had Picasa, iTunes and Firefox all go mental with 100% CPU usage, to the point that after 20 minutes I gave up waiting for Task Manager to appear. With my old processor this could - and occasionally did - happen all day without me even noticing. Ah well, it’s worth it for the extra stability.

That went smoothly. Weird. I expect something to catch fire any moment. I struggled to remove the ninja, but my only real mistake was somehow downloading the latest 300mb AutoPatcher in Polish. Whoops. Once the main programs are up and running I’ll plug in the webcam / card reader and leave the computer running overnight. If it’s still going in the morning I shall perform the happy happy dance of the geek. Napoleon Dynamite has nothing on me.

After the initial Windows setup I installed Kubuntu to a separate partition, and the first thing I did was go into System Settings and configure the monitor and resolution. It asked for a restart, then came back with mangled fonts and a completely broken interface - anything I tried to open crashed immediately, including System Settings. I booted with the ‘recovery’ option and ended up at a prompt, which isn’t much use for novices like me. So that was a short-lived experiment. I’m sure it’s worth persevering with, but if the supposedly most user-friendly Linux distro ever is this persnickety I might wait a few more years.

Since I’m getting nowhere fixing website problems, I’ve decided instead to finally sort out my computer. Based on the theory that it’s the X2 processor causing many problems, I’m downgrading to an old single-core model. This will hopefully let me use USB devices without everything crashing every few hours. I’ll lose a huge amount of power and speed, of course, but it’s the only option that doesn’t require new hardware. It does involve reinstalling Windows, though, and this procedure’s historical everything-going-to-plan:everything-going-tits-up ratio is about 3:2, so we’ll see…I think I’ll install Ubuntu Linux at the same time, just for fun. Wheee.

I may be back later, I may not. In the meantime here are some excellent fan people.

Via FoEM, Paramount’s marketing copy for the upcoming Stardust movie:

“Stardust,” based on the best-selling graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, takes audiences on an adventure that begins in a village in England and ends up in places that exist in a magical world. A young man named Tristan (Charlie Cox) tries to win the heart of Victoria (Sienna Miller), the beautiful but cold object of his desire, by going on a quest to retrieve a fallen star. His journey takes him to a mysterious and forbidden land beyond the walls of his village. On his odyssey, Tristan finds the star, which has transformed into a striking girl named Yvaine (Claire Danes).

However, Tristan is not the only one seeking the star. A king’s (Peter O’Toole) four living sons – not to mention the ghosts of their three dead brothers – all need the star as they vie for the throne. Tristan must also overcome the evil witch, Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), who needs the star to make her young again. As Tristan battles to survive these threats, his quest changes. He must now win the heart of the star for himself as he discovers the meaning of true love.

Made me smile. The first sentence is my favourite.

The official site’s synopsis is an evolution of sorts.

I’ve had reasonably high traffic levels recently, with the svchost and Derren Brown posts getting lots of attention. As a result my website keeps falling over for unknown reasons. ‘Reasonably high’ is only ~500 visits per day, which isn’t much by the standards of many blogs, and I definitely shouldn’t be having these kind of problems. I turned on a caching program which this afternoon broke, serving blank pages. Argh. I’ve downgraded to a theme that’s very easy on the server and shall monitor it for a few days. Early indications are it’s not making much difference, which is just weird.

The first trailer for The Golden Compass is out. It’s on YouTube, but I’d really recommend watching the high quality version here, as it’s full of detail. I think it looks promising: Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel = great, Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter = great, Eva Green as Serafina Pekkala may well induce thoughts entirely inappropriate for a kid’s film, and the actress chosen for Lyra seems to look the part.

The trailer is odd, though, and I think it’s because every shot of Lyra shows her alone. Where’s Pantalaimon? There’s one shot of him at the end, but I couldn’t spot him in the background beforehand. Maybe he’s CGI and simply hasn’t been completed yet? It’s strangely wrong that he’s missing, Lyra isn’t Lyra without him.