I’ve completed National Novel Writing Month for the last two years in a row, but I can’t do it this year. I’d love to, and could probably find the time, at the expense of many other things, but I don’t think it would be wise. I’m just over a month into the first term of uni and not really into a proper routine yet; my work would undoubtedly suffer if I tried to write 1667 words per day around it, and I don’t want to fall behind at this stage. If I’d plotted out the story this month and knew exactly what I was going to write each day then I might have managed it, but making it up as I go takes too long. I can reel off a list of excuses, but it comes down to being just a little too busy, which is annoying - the feeling of satisfaction at the end is immense, even if the project is at times hellish. Next year, hopefully.

Yesterday’s trip to uni was successful, thankfully, and my last-minute project is now mostly printed. I’m at the stage where, if disaster struck, I could hand in the work so far and it would be marginally acceptable.

I ran into a slight problem when the university cash machine was broken, and the media store only took cash. Well, they also took cheques, but given that it’s no longer 1974 I didn’t have a cheque book on me. I can understand their reluctance to take credit cards with their associated surcharges, but they could just add the fees onto the total price - if they explain the situation I can’t see anybody minding.

In the end I managed to get most things done with the paper I had, but a very kind person offered to lend me the money if necessary, which was great. I’m going in tomorrow - nothing like leaving things until the last minute - to print one more image then mount them all (never done this before), and then I should be ready to hand in on Friday. This will be a massive relief; on Saturday night I am so hitting the toffee apples.

Spoiling a potential Christmas present here, but it’s too good not to share - this is lovely and would make a cool gift for the Calvin and Hobbes fan in your life. Speaking of C&H, BoingBoing recently linked to a great and very well-researched page of little-known Bill Watterson drawings, including old strips, paintings and one-off C&H strips.

I spent much of today panicking over a photography project due in this Friday. The idea I’d been planning and working on for a few weeks fell through due to a combination of my muppetry and some unfortunate timings, so I came up with a new plan this evening, and called a friend in the hope he might be around to help. Not only was he around, but he didn’t complain once about spending much of the evening doing this:

Which isn’t as easy as it looks. I have impressive friends - thanks, Nod!

I’m going to London tomorrow to develop the films and hopefully get a few decent prints. I’m annoyed with myself that it’s ended up so last-minute, but I’ve learnt not to leave anything mission-critical to the last few days, and plenty more besides. Hopefully the prints will turn out ok tomorrow - not sure what I do if not…

Just came within centimetres of hitting a deer at 60mph. Damn thing ambled out in front of me, slow as you like, and after a split second of braking I realised it was way too close and just managed to swing around it. Can’t have missed it by much, and the back of my car was going on its own little adventure for a while there. I don’t think it was big enough that I’d have been in danger, but I’d have wrecked the deer, the car and my week. There aren’t any signs down that stretch of A-road, but I’ll certainly be watching out in future.

Dear Public,

You are stupid and should not be allowed to vote on TV talent shows.

Yours,

Andrew and Abi

There is no obvious solution to my iPod and mobile phone simultaneously indicating they’re on the way out¹. None.

Actually, one look at the O2 tariffs suggests there really isn’t. £269 for the iPhone, then £35/month for 200mins/200texts/unlimited data? I think not. Given that my phone and iPod have together cost me £10/month all year, I can’t even consider something like that. I’ll wait for the gPhone.

1. whacking the former on the table, as per Ed’s suggestion, has actually done the trick for now [↩]

I’ve been away from the news today so haven’t seen the coverage of the cervical cancer vaccine. I remember that similar proposals caused something of a fuss in the US, and I’m wondering whether the UK media gave the nutters any airtime. The main BBC News article doesn’t even mention them, which is cool. The health Q&A mentions them briefly, but it’s only a dumb Have Your Say question that really raises the issue. Quite glad I didn’t listen to Jeremy Vine today, though.

There are probably some anti-vaccination nutters out there, but I’m specifically thinking of the extreme religious variety:

Some Christian groups have expressed unease, concerned that the jab may encourage promiscuity.

Colin Hart, Director of The Christian Institute, said the way to tackle the problem was not to offer injections, but to tell girls not to have under-age sex.

Because cervical cancer is god’s way of punishing women for having under-age sex. Or over-age sex, for that matter. I’m sure they could pick up an STD from their husband, if he’d had extra-marital sex, but presumably it’s still up to the women to suffer, as ever. What a vile little shit these people worship.

Obviously it’s not all Christians and is limited to an extreme fringe. But it’s still astonishing to me that anybody could fall for a belief system which requires them to publicly suggest they would prefer to see women have underage sex and get cancer than them have underage sex and not get cancer. How do you break your brain that much?

Comments have gone a bit weird (thanks, Ed). Not sure what’s causing it atm, but they do work sometimes. Bit late now and I’m at uni all day tomorrow, but shall take a look asap. Might have broken the theme, which could do with updating with the latest code anyway. Thought things were a bit quiet.

While looking for history of photography resources earlier today I found this site:

This podcast is recorded during class lectures for History of Photography, Photo 1105 at College of DuPage. The podcasts are intended as review for students in the class, but thousands of people around the world have found them useful to their education as photographers.

I was then mildly disappointed to discover that the podcast has a video component, which wouldn’t be supported by my iPod even if it were working, and either way I wouldn’t be able to listen to it while driving. About half a second later I vowed to brain myself with a saucepan at the next available opportunity: if I want audio-only explanations of topics, I should perhaps have chosen a degree less inherently visual. Doofus.

Moving on, the video podcast is actually rather impressive: you can skip through the slides using Quicktime’s controls, rather than playing a guessing game with the slider, and it’s synced up with the appropriate audio from the lecture. I confess I haven’t watched it all yet, but it seems like a cool resource, and it’s wonderful that the College of DuPage in Illinois is releasing it for free.

Having a miniature Fleetwood Mac obsession at the moment, but upon playing ‘Landslide’ for the umpteenth time this evening my iPod promptly stalled, then displayed this:

next to the Apple support link.  The usual menu + centre button restart trick doesn’t work, and looking at the website indicates this means I need to take it in for repair. Bugger. I suppose it is two and a half years old, which given the daily use isn’t a bad age.

Incidentally, the level to which I have anthropomorphisised my iPod based on that logo is quite ridiculous. I actually feel sorry for it. I think this is a clever marketing strategy.

Someone on my course just emailed around news of a six-part series on the history and culture of photography. The first episode is on BBC4 this Thursday at 2100:

Photography first came to life in Venice where Abe Morell used bin-liners and masking tape to turn a room into a camera - but the images created were transitory.

Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre discovered how to ‘fix the shadows’ to produce permanent images and at that moment photography was born.

Fixing the Shadows follows the birth of photography through to the age of mass photography triggered by the creation of Kodak by George Eastman.

I’m currently writing an essay comparing two published histories of photography. It involves concentrating more on what’s missing than what’s actually there, though, and I’m somehow learning little history in the process. This series should be very helpful.

My favourite moment in the early history involves Fox Talbot on his honeymoon, trying to paint an Italian lake. He used a camera lucida, an optical device that superimposes a reflected image of the scene onto the drawing surface, and produced the following:

To which he thought “this is shit”, and invented photography instead¹. I can identify with this mindset.

BBC4 are kicking ass at the moment. Their recent Comics Britannia series is sitting on my Toppy waiting for a spare few hours, but what I’ve seen so far has been great.

1. this is normally written as ‘found the results disappointing, but we know what they mean [↩]

Had something of a breakthrough today. Late this afternoon I noticed the website go down and called Damien, who in turn quickly spoke to the company that physically run the server. As the situation was ‘live’ they logged in to try to figure out what was happening. They immediately spotted 79 simultaneous connections to various pages on my site, all from porn IPs and zombie machines, that were completely overloading the system. Some very fast work with iptables calmed the situation somewhat, and we’re now blocking over 500 IPs.

Current theory: spam spikes have been causing the server to stop responding. They’re all trying to leave comments or trackbacks, and although Akismet / Bad Behaviour do a sterling job of blocking them, they still need to be processed. We had one at 1400, which would correspond with 0900 on the east coast of the US, and thousands of zombie machines getting turned on (possibly confirmation bias, but not an unreasonable possibility). All the recent tweaking of the server shored it up so it lasted longer, but there’s little the average server can do against what amounts to distributed denial-of-service attacks.

I didn’t know the extent of the spam problem. My statistics programs all require javascript to be enabled on the client, explaining why they only report ~300 visitors per day. Akismet outages told me that I was popular with spammers, but a) I assumed everyone was and b) I didn’t know about the spikes.

I don’t know whether this was the primary cause of the crashes or a contributing factor, but either way it’s a very helpful discovery. I’ve set up a duplicate site on another server to determine how well the site performs independent of evil spammers, but I’m hopeful this site should be much more stable now.

This made me laugh so very, very much (language not safe for work):

Via Ben Hammersley. There are a whole range of Eddie Izzard/lego combinations here.

It has long been said that you could write ‘increases depth of imaging, lushness, range and soundstage’ on a ferret and you’ll find an audiophile to buy it. This works well with gold-plated, oxygen-free, black, lifted-above-the-carpet cables, but also for magic pens and $1000 wooden knobs. This is because people are rubbish at judging sound quality without a double-blind test. Believe me, I’ve been there - I once told my parents to spend £25 on posh banana plugs. However, I like to think that not even the richest, most scientifically illiterate audiophile on the planet would fall for this:

The Teleportation Tweak is the phenomenal new product from Machina Dynamica. The Teleportation Tweak is an advanced communications technique discovered and developed by Machina Dynamica for upgrading audio systems remotely — even over very long distances. The Teleportation Tweak has a profound effect on the sound and is performed during a phone call to Machina Dynamica; the phone call can be made via landline or cell phone from any room in the house. The Teleportation Tweak is performed over the telephone line and will sound to the listener like a series of mechanical noises. The tweak itself takes about 30 seconds.

Do you think it’s a joke? I hope it’s a joke.